Review

In the concluding scene of the First Gospel, while issuing the famous “Great Commission” to His disciples, Jesus makes this bold and forthright assertion:  “All authority (exousia) has been given to Me in heaven and on earth” (Matthew 28:18). 

These words, though recorded by Matthew, contain the essence of the Gospel of Mark.  As we’ve been discovering, it would be fair to say that the unrivalled authority of Jesus Christ, Son of God and Son of Man, is the heart and soul of this powerful little book.  We might even go so far as to contend that Mark’s message reflects the message of the New Testament as a whole; for in an important sense, Jesus’ claim to absolute authority is the Word that brings the kingdom and turns the world upside down (Acts 17:6).  It’s the challenge that makes tyrants tremble and causes despots to turn sick with fear.   

This is the note on which we ended last week’s discussion:  our study of the healing of the woman with the hemorrhage.  Quoting commentator Eckhard Schnabel, we said that this woman’s great faith – the faith that saved her and made her well – can be defined precisely as her “personal conviction that Jesus has divine authority to heal her.”^[i]

With this miracle of mercy behind Him, Jesus presses on to the house of Jairus where the synagogue leader’s young daughter has been lying at the point of death.

“Keep on Believing”:  Verses 35 & 36

35 While He was still speaking, they came from the house of the synagogue official, saying, Your daughter has died; why trouble the Teacher any more?” 36 But Jesus, overhearing what was being spoken, said to the synagogue official, “Do not be afraid any longer, only believe.” [ii]

Just as the middle section of Mark’s narrative “sandwich” draws to a happy conclusion, our double episode takes another jag.  We now learn that, even as Jesus was pausing by the wayside to look after one suffering individual, another lost her life – a familiar scenario in the era of COVID-19.  Jairus’ little daughter is dead.  And the hopelessness of the situation is reflected in the words of the messengers:  “Don’t bother the Teacher any further.  His services are no longer required.”

Jesus, of course, pays them no heed.  “Not so fast,” He seems to say, speaking directly to the grieving father.  “Do you honestly think there is such a thing as a problem I can’t handle?  Is there any time, no matter what the circumstance, when My help isn’t required?  I’ve got more up my sleeve than you can imagine.  All authority is given to me in heaven and on earth.  Your role is simply to trust.”                           

“Only believe.”  Sounds simple, right?  We know it isn’t.  But the good news is that this isn’t a one-time-only, all-or-nothing proposition.  On the contrary, it’s an ongoing challenge – a marathon rather than a sprint.  The Greek verb Mark uses to translate Christ’s Aramaic is pisteue, a present-tense imperative.  It’s a command word that urges constant, persistent, ever-renewed, decisive action in the moment-by-moment here-and-now.  It means more than just “believe.”  It has the force of “Keep on believing.”  Believe, even when you think you can’t.  Believe and then believe again.  If you question your convictions, don’t stop there – counter your questions with different questions.  Push back and push ahead.  If you fall down, get up and go on.  Put your fears aside and keep on believing!                 

Playing It Cool:  Verses 37-40

37 And He allowed no one to follow with Him, except Peter and James and John the brother of James. 38 And they came to the house of the synagogue official; and He beheld a commotion, and people loudly weeping and wailing. 39 And entering in, He said to them, “Why make a commotion and weep?  The child has not died, but is asleep.” 40 And they were laughing at Him.  But putting them all out, He took along the child’s father and mother and His own companions, and entered the room where the child was.    

Apparently Jairus is convinced; sufficiently convinced, in any case, to put one foot in front of the other and move forward with Jesus at his side.  Jairus believes in the present tense, even though at this point he sees no reason to be hopeful.  His determined resignation in the face of despair illustrates the biblical principle that “faith is the assurance (substance) of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1).  It reminds us that “Hope that is seen is not hope; for why does one also hope for what he sees?  But if we hope for what we do not see, with perseverance we wait eagerly for it” (Romans 8:24, 25).

When they get to the house, everything is in an uproar.  The “commotion” Mark describes – the loud weeping and wailing, probably accompanied by the skirl of two or three bone or reed flutes – was all part of the service provided by paid professional mourners.[iii]  Their job was to kick up a huge fuss as a way of demonstrating the family’s grief and protesting the obscene horror of death.  But Jesus puts a lid on all this as soon as He steps through the door.

“What’s the big deal?” He asks, casting an eye around the room.  “Don’t you know she’s only sleeping?”  Their sudden laughter is an indication of the sincerity of their “grief”.  This is just another “gig” as far as most of these folks are concerned – a matter of indifference, whether laughing or crying.  But Jesus sees things differently. 

In fact, Jesus is the only one who really knows what’s happening here; the only person present who grasps the true significance of the case.  On the one hand, He’s fully acquainted with the tragedy of death.  He knows its pain from the inside out.  On the other hand, He realizes that death doesn’t get the final word.  He is supremely aware of Himself as King, and He knows that the King has all authority – even authority over death.  So His first act upon arrival is to scatter the confusion and put a damper on the drama.  His strategy is to play it cool.  “Let’s stop the circus,” He says, “and restore some perspective to this situation.”                                 

After downplaying the hype, His next move is to shrink the crowd.  Here again Jesus shows us that “small is beautiful,” that individual need takes precedence over public show, and that privacy is the proper context for an encounter with the divine (Matthew 6:6).  On the cusp of a miracle like the one Jesus is about to perform, most modern “faith leaders” wouldn’t miss the opportunity to issue a press release and get a contingent of cameramen on the scene.  But that’s not the Master’s way, nor is it the point of His kingdom.  He has no interest in stirring up publicity or staging a media event.  Instead, He quietly ushers everyone out of the house except for those few who are most personally and immediately concerned.  Then, in the company of the parents and His three closest disciples, He steps into the girl’s room.              

Staying Focused:  Verses 41-43

41 And taking the child by the hand, He said to her, “Talitha kum!” (which translated means, “Little girl, I say to you, arise!”) 42 And immediately the girl got up and began to walk; for she was twelve years old.  And immediately they were completely astounded. 43 And He gave them strict orders that no one should know about this; and He said that something should be given her to eat.    

Once within that silent, private sanctuary, out of the limelight and away from the hoopla, Jesus gets right down to work.  Instantly He takes stock of the situation, assesses the problem, and addresses the need.  He makes no use of spells or incantations, after the fashion of the healers and exorcists of His day, nor does He shout, strut, parade, or put on an impressive show of power.  Instead, He performs four very simple acts, each of which underscores the priority He places upon the needs of the individual as over against the demands of the crowd.

First, He walks up to the bed and takes the child by the hand.  As in the case of the woman with the hemorrhage and so many of the miracles narrated in the Gospels, the healing Jesus administers in this instance is associated with skin-on-skin touch.  It’s by way of this human contact that Christ applies the  supernatural remedy.  Through His touch He becomes the up-close, living, breathing incarnation of God’s love.  As His followers, we can do the same.      

Second, He supplements the touch with words; for as we know, it was not merely by an act of power, but by the Word of God that the worlds were made (Hebrews 11:3).  Jesus Himself is the creating, sustaining, healing, and resurrecting Word of God (John 1:1); and so, while touching her hand, He bends over the “slumbering” child and speaks to her.  “Talitha kum!” He says.  This is no magical formula, but a phrase drawn from the everyday life of an ordinary family.  These are the words with which any mother might rouse any child in the morning:  “Time to get up, little girl!”  Mark leaves the Aramaic untranslated because, to his way of thinking, it’s an indispensable detail of the scene as it actually unfolded.  Peter, Mark’s eyewitness source, remembers it just so.  

Third, when the girl gets out of bed and begins to walk around – an earth-shattering event which is nevertheless related in the most matter-of-fact language – Jesus tells the others to “Get her something to eat.”  According to the written accounts we possess, Jesus only raised three people from the dead during the course of His earthly ministry:  Lazarus; the widow of Nain’s son; and Jairus’ daughter.  This, then, is an extremely rare occurrence as well as an astounding miracle.  And yet instead of calling attention to His feat – instead of saying, “Look at what I just did!  Now are you convinced?” – Jesus stays focused on the needs of the individual.  After all, this girl is only twelve years old and she’s been through an ordeal few of us can even imagine.  She has died and come back to life again!  As far as He’s concerned, it’s obvious what needs to happen next:  Take care of her immediate needs.  “Get her something to eat.”  This is the thought that occupies Him in this moment of moments.

Finally, Jesus concludes with a familiar refrain:  “Don’t let anyone know about this.”  Here again He presents Himself to us as the “Incognito Messiah,” the Savior who, as far as possible, tries to keep His mind-blowing, death-defying exploits under wraps for fear that they will be misinterpreted and the true nature of His kingdom misunderstood.  It’s a command that no one will be able to keep, of course:  the cat will be out of the bag just as soon as Jairus’ daughter is presented alive to family members, neighbors, and friends.  But Jesus issues it anyway, not because He desires to saddle Jairus and his clan with an impossible burden of secrecy, but because He wants us to know that publicity, hype, showmanship, and advertising are no part of His agenda.  What He cares about is the sacred and solemn task of linking the individual with God.          

Final Thoughts

In the last couple of chapters Mark has recorded four miracles illustrating four different aspects of Jesus’ authority:  authority over nature (4:35-41); authority over demons or arkys (5:1-20); authority over illness (5:21-34); and last of all, authority over death (5:35-43).  This, as we said at the beginning of this entry, is the message of Mark’s Gospel in a nutshell:  “All authority is given to Me in heaven and on earth.”  

We should add that, in a very real sense, these acts of power are nothing in and of themselves.  They are not “proofs” of anything, but rather “signs” (to use John’s term).  Their function is to direct our attention beyond the healing or deliverance of the moment to a larger truth:  the growing realization that this Man from Nazareth is something more than He seems to be.  Exactly what that “something” is has yet to be fully revealed.  But for the moment these miracles have the effect of raising disturbing questions in the minds of everyone who witnesses them – questions powerful enough to engage our curiosity and keep us wondering what’s going to happen next.   

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[i] Eckhard Schnabel, The Tyndale Commentary on Mark, p. 127.

[ii] This week’s Scripture quotations come from the New American Standard Bible. 

[iii] “Even the poorest in Israel do not hire less than two flute players and one wailing woman.” (m. Ketub 4:4; quoted in Schnabel, p. 128).

Review

Jesus has taken a first step in direction of expanding the kingdom of God beyond the boundaries of previous religious expectation.  He has crossed the Sea of Galilee, landed in Gentile territory, and demonstrated His absolute authority over the local spiritual potentates (arkys) by freeing a man from demonic possession.  In response to this dramatic display of divine power, the people of Gerasa, with an eye to protecting their economic interests and preserving the status quo, have politely (or perhaps not so politely) asked Him to leave.  And Jesus, because He never forces Himself on anyone (unlike some of His followers), has complied.  This next passage finds Him back on the “Jewish side” of the lake.                      

“Sandwiching”

Jesus continues in action mode in the verses that follow.  In fact, He leaps straight into the 21^st century by engaging in what our contemporaries like to call “multi-tasking”.  He takes on two stiff challenges and performs two astonishing miracles at almost one and the same time.  What we have here is a double episode:  Mark narrates two events within a single passage by “sandwiching” one within the other – a technique he employs several times during the course of his Gospel (see 3:20-35 and 11:12-25). 

This is superb story-telling.  Not only does it engage and hold our interest by maintaining a high level of tension, uncertainty, and expectation.  It also reflects our experience of real life – a life in which it’s always “just one thing after another.”  This leads one to suspect that Mark’s narrative technique is not “technique” at all, but simply faithfulness in recording these events as they actually unfolded in real time. 

But let’s get back to the text.            

President of The Synagogue:  Verses 21-24

21 When Jesus had crossed again in a boat to the other side, a large crowd gathered around Him, and He was by the sea. 22 Then one of the synagogue rulers, named Jairus, came up, and when he saw Jesus, he fell at His feet. 23 He asked Him urgently, “My little daughter is near death.  Come and lay Your hands on her so that she may be healed and live.” 24 Jesus went with him, and a large crowd followed and pressed around Him. [i]

A theme that emerges almost immediately in this section is that of Jesus’ laser-like concern for the individual. 

We’ve talked a great deal about arkys during the course of this study:  both the spiritual powers and principalities who rule over this present darkness and the human “authorities” who serve as their mortal, temporal representatives.  We’ve seen how Jesus clashes with these archai and exousiai almost as soon as He comes up out of the waters of baptism.  What we want to notice now is His remarkable ability to look past this conflict when circumstances require it:  to pierce the clouds of arkydom, ignore the claims of the Powers That Be, and fix His attentive gaze upon the person who happens to be wearing their badge and uniform at any given moment in time. 

Jairus is one of the “presidents of the synagogue” – an archisynagogos.  He is precisely the kind of person who might have had serious issues with Jesus at this stage in His ministry:  a prominent, powerful leader of the community with every reason to feel threatened by the subversive, revolutionary claims and pretensions of an upstart preacher and miracle worker.  Many commentators have noted how difficult it must have been for him to overcome his desire to maintain a respectable distance, to push past his prejudices, and to go bowing and scraping to a scruffy “popular” healer from Nazareth.  After all, what would his parishioners say?  But so dire is his daughter’s situation that he’s driven to set all this aside.  He “pockets his pride, forgets his fears,”[ii] and throws himself at Jesus feet.

All this is precisely accurate and true.  Jairus did have some formidable hurdles to get over before He could bring Himself to seek the Master’s aid.  But what about Jesus?  Were there any obstacles He needed to overcome in order to respond affirmatively to Jairus’ appeal?  I think so.

Remember, Jesus had already offended the archisynagogoi on several occasions.  More than once He had violated the Mosaic Law by healing on the sabbath right in the middle of a synagogue service.  He knew that these religious leaders were out to get Him – to kill Him, in fact.  When He saw Jairus approaching, it would have been easy for Him to say, “This man is my enemy.  This man is an agent of the spiritual archai and exousiai who oppose the advance of God’s kingdom.  He’s one of the pigs!”  But He didn’t.  Instead, He looked past all this and saw an individual in desperate need. 

We need to cultivate this same perspective.  As disciples of the greatest Revolutionary of all time, it’s easy for us to justify a dismissive attitude towards the proud and pompous magnates who occupy positions of influence within the power elite:  people who serve, whether wittingly or unwittingly, as the face, hands, and feet of oppressive “spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places.”  It’s easy to look around and see nothing but “The Man” – “bosses,” “cops,” “executives,” “soldiers,” “presidents,” “organization men,” and “CEOs” – when in fact we are surrounded by flesh-and-blood human beings just like ourselves.  Jesus never made that mistake.  On the contrary, He accepted Joseph of Arimathea, “a prominent man of the Sanhedrin,” as one of His secret followers (Mark 15:43).  While vehemently denouncing Pharisaism as an institution (Matthew 23), He had no problem socializing with individual Pharisees like Simon (Luke 7:36) and Nicodemus (John 3:1,2).  And though He was obviously unimpressed with Pilate’s office (John 19:10, 11), He nevertheless spoke freely, openly, and candidly with Pilate as a man. 

In every respect Jesus exemplified and lived out a basic biblical principle:  while we owe nothing to the representatives of arkydom in the way of loyalty, duty, respect, or allegiance, we still have a very real obligation to love them as people (Romans 13:8).  And so when Jairus asks Him to come and lay hands on his daughter, He doesn’t hesitate for an instant.  Immediately He turns on His heel and heads off towards the synagogue ruler’s house.                                                       

“If Only …”:  Verses 25-29

25 Now a woman was there who had been suffering from a hemorrhage for twelve years. 26 She had endured a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all that she had.  Yet instead of getting better, she grew worse. 27 When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind Him in the crowd and touched His cloak, 28 for she kept saying, “If only I touch His clothes, I will be healed.” 29 At once the bleeding stopped, and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease. 

At this point there’s an interruption.  Hardly is the story of Jairus and his daughter out of the gate before it’s cut short by an emergency.  The middle section of Mark’s “narrative sandwich” slips into place as an unknown woman suddenly arrives on the scene; a woman whose sense of desperation is every bit as urgent as Jairus’.  For twelve years she’s been suffering from a chronic disease – a recurring and unstoppable flow of blood – and up to this point no one has been able to cure her.  She’s heard about Jesus, and so deep is her confidence in His healing power that she’s willing to do almost anything to access it.  She isn’t asking much.  “If only I can touch His garments,” she says, “I will be healed.”  Forget the thrill and drama of meeting a famous wonder-worker.  That plays no part in her thinking.  All she wants is to be set free from her ailment, and she believes Jesus has the power to grant her wish.   

There are a couple of things we want to notice about this woman.  In the first place, there’s her obvious desire to keep a low profile.  In contrast to Jairus, who walks straight up to Jesus with his request, she advances cautiously from behind, taking good advantage of the crowd cover.  She wants to tap into Christ’s power without making a scene or drawing attention to herself.  This may be attributable to the fact that, according to Jewish law, the blood flow from which she was suffering rendered her ceremonially unclean.  It’s even possible that she was under some kind of quarantine and afraid of being discovered in a public place.  Whatever the reason, we can say with certainty that her faith, for which she will later receive the Teacher’s commendation, was tempered in this instance by a healthy degree of fear and trepidation (more on this to come).  Clearly, there was nothing bold, brash, presumptuous, or demanding about this woman! 

Second, there’s an important sense in which the woman’s faith, for all its saving efficacy, is something quite different from biblical faith as we usually understand it.  Indeed, her view can almost be described as “mechanical” or “magical” in character.  We often speak of saving faith in terms of a deep personal relationship with Jesus:  a relationship that involves prayer, study, diligent interaction with God, experiential learning, and a long process of growth and sanctification.  But for this woman, faith is summed up in a single thought:  “If only I can touch His garments, I’ll be healed.”  She expects to receive healing not as the result of a long-term relationship with Christ, but as an instantaneous transfer of power due to some kind of automatic physical transaction.  Some of us might have serious issues with this kind of “faith”, and not without good reason.  But in this case we’re going to have to reserve judgment until we see how Jesus responds.   
                            

In the Spotlight:  Verses 30-32

30 Jesus knew at once that power had gone out from Him.  He turned around in the crowd and said, “Who touched My clothes?” 31 His disciples said to Him, “You see the crowd pressing against You and You say, ‘Who touched Me?’” 32 But He looked around to see who had done it.    

As it turns out, the woman is not mistaken in her assumptions.  Just as she had expected, healing power flows out of Jesus and cures her at once, without any conscious response on His part.  The amazing thing about this is that Jesus can sense it.  He knows what has happened, and so He asks a question that sounds utterly ridiculous in the ears of His disciples:  “Who touched my clothes?”  Given the press of the crowd, the answer is obvious, laughably obvious:  “Everyone has been touching Your clothes, Jesus!”  But the Master realizes that there’s more to it than this.  He knew He had felt something – something like a bolt of lightning.  Everyone may have been touching His clothes, but that touch was a touch like no other.  It was something altogether unique.     

As in the case of the woman, so with Jesus there are a couple of observations that beg to be made.  First, to His way of thinking, theological considerations and ritual requirements take a back seat to urgent human need.  Jesus doesn’t care that the woman’s understanding of faith may not be precisely correct.  Simple and primitive though it may be, that faith has succeeded in making the desired connection, and that’s all that counts.  Nor does it bother Him that, in the eyes of official religion, the touch of this woman has defiled Him ritually.  As He sees it, the Law of Moses must give way to the demands of the Law of Love.  All this leads us to an inevitable conclusion:  faith in Jesus – at least in its initial phase – is not a matter of dotting your “I’s” and crossing your “T’s”.  Come to Him on your own terms and He will meet you there.  This is what saving faith is all about.

Second, as the spotlight falls upon the woman and Jesus glances around to locate her in the crowd, Mark effectively reiterates and underscores our overarching theme:  Christ’s intense concern for the individual.  Though Jesus often addresses large gatherings and manages huge throngs, in the final analysis He has no interest in numbers.  What really grabs His attention is the desperation of that one man or woman who really needs His help and really believes He has the power to grant it.  Here again we are reminded of one of the founding principles of God’s kingdom:  “small is beautiful.”  Ultimately, everything can be boiled down to the one-on-one encounter between the believer and Jesus Christ.  As N. T. Wright expresses it, this woman’s experience exemplifies “the intimate nature of the contact between the individual and Jesus that Mark expects and hopes his readers to develop for themselves.”[iii]       

Fear and Trembling:  Verses 33-34

33 Then the woman, with fear and trembling, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell down before Him and told Him the whole truth. 34 He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well.  Go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”    

The last point I want to make is this:  even in the moment of triumph – even when she knows beyond question that her prayer has been answered and her expectations fulfilled – this woman still approaches Jesus in an attitude of humility and self-abnegation.  Realizing that she has not escaped His notice, she falls down before Him in “fear and trembling.”  She places no confidence in her own merits or deserts.  She assumes nothing and presumes nothing.  She neither stands on her dignity nor demands her rights.  Instead, she pours out her heart, confessing the whole truth, telling her story in detail.  With great trepidation, she acknowledges that while her approach may not have been entirely orthodox, she has nevertheless been made the recipient of sheer unconditional grace.

Wright concludes by suggesting that it is precisely this “odd mixture of fear and faith” that “characterizes so much Christian discipleship.”[iv]  In other words, he says that as followers of Jesus, we live out our lives in a kind of balancing act somewhere between uncertainty and conviction.  I think he’s right.  And I believe his observation is well worth remembering at a time when many self-professed believers seem to be arrogantly presuming that God is somehow obligated to protect them from a highly infectious disease simply because they say so.             

Final Thoughts

“Your faith has made you well [or saved you].”  This is Jesus’ final comment on the incident; and while it is the kind of statement that fills us with both encouragement and hope, it also raises several poignant questions.  Does this pronouncement mean that it was not Jesus Himself who made the woman well, but something that originated in her own heart?  That it was not His power – the power that flowed out of Him and into her – but rather her belief – her confidence, determination, and stubborn desire to touch Him and lay hold of His goodness – that effected the miracle?  And while we’re on the subject, what is “faith” (Greek pistis) after all?  How do we follow the woman’s example in this regard?  How can we know that we have such “faith” and that we’re exercising it correctly? 

Books could be written in response to these inquiries.  Perhaps we’ll gain some clearer insight into the answers as we move forward in our study of Mark.  But for now it might be just as well to conclude with Eckhard Schnabel’s simple assertion that, in this particular case, “faith” was the woman’s “personal conviction that Jesus has divine authority to heal her.”[v]                

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[i] This week’s Scripture quotations come from The Net Bible. 

[ii] N. T. Wright, Mark for Everyone, p. 59.

[iii] Ibid., p. 61.

[iv] Ibid. 

[v] Eckhard Schnabel, The Tyndale Commentary on Mark, p. 127.

Review

“The time has come,” the walrus said,

To speak of Bigger Gigs;

Of Kings and Lords and Presidents,

Of Potentates and Pigs.”

The walrus never said that, of course.  Nor did Lewis Carroll write it.  But as the second part of the story of the Gerasene Demoniac reveals, Pigs and Potentates do have something in common.  Both can play host to demons:  those supernatural Powers and Principalities we’ve been lumping together under the heading of arkys.  To that extent, at least, Potentates and Pigs belong to a single class and category; and this suggests that there may be other similarities between them.  Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that George Orwell chose pigs to represent the power elite.  

In the previous episode we saw Jesus make a dramatic symbolic statement about the boundless extent of God’s kingdom by landing on the Gentile side of the lake.  We saw the “Local Authorities,” in the form of a man possessed by a Legion of demons, come forward to confront His claim.  We watched as that man and those invisible arkys acknowledged the irrefutable authority of Jesus by bowing down before Him and pleading with Him not to oust them from their territorial domain. 

Let’s find out what happens next.                  

Porcine Possession:  Verses 11-13

11 There happened to be a large herd of pigs feeding on the hillside nearby. 12 “Send us into those pigs,” the spirits begged.  “Let us enter them.” 13 So Jesus gave them permission.  The evil spirits came out of the man and entered the pigs, and the entire herd of about 2,000 pigs plunged down the steep hillside into the lake and drowned in the water. [i]

“A large herd of pigs.”  Yet another indication that, from a strictly Jewish point of view, “we’re not in Kansas anymore.”  This really is “the other side of the lake;” for as we know, to the Law-abiding Israelite, pigs are every bit as “unclean” as the graveyard where the demon-possessed man had been living. 

This in itself constitutes an awkward, uncomfortable circumstance for Jesus and His disciples.  Clearly, they are now traveling through a very different kind of place:  a land of pigs.  It’s all rather messy and dirty.  But things often turn out that way when God’s kingdom begins to move out into the world at large.

Recognizing that the mere presence of Jesus has already sealed their doom, and being territorial and local in orientation, the demons suddenly realize that they’re in imminent need of a new domicile.  As we learn elsewhere (Luke 11:24-26), a disembodied existence is not an option for them:  their Chief expects them to dominate someone or something, and they can’t bear the thought of existence in any other mode.  So they beg permission to take possession of the pigs.  And oddly enough, Jesus agrees. 

The sequel is as disturbing as it is bizarre.  No sooner have the evil spirits made their move than the entire herd of porkers precipitates itself over the edge of a cliff and into the waters of the lake.  Biblically speaking, the monsters go back to their place of origin in the dark and murky depths of the sea. 

This is yet another detail that is almost certain to prove problematic for modern readers.  Much as we prize violence, mayhem, death, and destruction in our entertainment, most of us nowadays still want to be assured that “no animals were harmed during the making of this film.”  Sadly, that isn’t the case here.  Why?  Because Arky conflict is serious business.  Once the battle is joined, there will be casualties.  And in the eyes of God, 2,000 pigs, valuable as they may be, can’t compare in worth with a single human life.  

What’s the point of this strange scene?  Most of the details are left maddeningly unexplained, but I think there are at least three conclusions we can draw from the text. 

First, there’s our recurring theme:  all authority in heaven and earth is given to Jesus (Matthew 28:18).  All other Powers and Principalities must ultimately bow to Him (Philippians 2:10, 11).  This is the earliest of all Christian confessions of faith:  Iesous Kyrios – “Jesus [is] LORD.”  And it teaches us that the Christian’s fealty, subjection, and obedience are due to Christ alone; that there are no graduated levels of fidelity and duty, no room for multiple allegiances in the life of a believer. 

Second, submission to other arkys quickly becomes possession by other arkys.  And possession by other arkys is always a bad thing.  It was bad for the man among the tombs.  It was even worse for the pigs.  Those who render allegiance to authorities other than Jesus may be able “get by” under that arrangement for a while, but in the end it will destroy them.                            

Finally, the “spiritual forces of wickedness in heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12) aren’t picky.  They’re open to utilizing a wide variety of methods, strategies, vehicles, and venues in order to accomplish their mission.  They can go with Potentates or Pigs.  To a certain extent it’s a matter of indifference to them (and their Leader) where they set up shop, whether it be with a political party, at a corporate headquarters, within the workings of a marketing or management scheme, or in a herd of swine.  They can make equally effective use of regional loyalties, neighborhood rivalries, racial prejudices, political commitments, Congress, the White House, or the Executive Committee of the World Council of Churches.  What matters is finding a “hook” to hang their hat on, someone to boss, and an excuse to subvert the goodness of God’s creation.  From that point forward it’s all smooth sailing for them – until Jesus shows up.                                           

“No Thanks!:”  Verses 14-17

14 The herdsmen fled to the nearby town and the surrounding countryside, spreading the news as they ran.  People rushed out to see what had happened. 15 A crowd soon gathered around Jesus, and they saw the man who had been possessed by the legion of demons.  He was sitting there fully clothed and perfectly sane, and they were all afraid. 16 Then those who had seen what happened told the others about the demon-possessed man and the pigs. 17 And the crowd began pleading with Jesus to go away and leave them alone.

Now for another bit of irony.  For all their diabolical wickedness, the demons we’ve encountered in Mark’s Gospel thus far have always been quick to acknowledge and submit to the authority of Jesus.  Humans, not so much.  That’s how it happens in Gerasa.  When the local farmers, stockmen, and townsfolk get wind of what’s going on, their response is unanimous:  “Get the heck out of here, Jesus!  We don’t cotton to this kind of thing in our neck of the woods!” 

Try to feel the impact of this.  A miracle has taken place!  A lost and broken Son of Adam has been healed, set free, restored to his right mind, and given a chance to re-establish himself in the life of the community.  A divine act of supernatural deliverance has exploded in the faces of the local inhabitants.  Yet their reaction is, “Go away and leave us alone!” 

It isn’t difficult to discern their line of reasoning:  “It’s the economy, stupid!”  Yes, the kingdom of heaven may have arrived on our doorstep.  Signs and wonders may be unfolding before our very eyes.  The earth may be shifting beneath our feet.  God-in-the-flesh may be walking among us.  But what of it?  There are more important things to think about!  The local pork industry just took a big hit!  Stocks are down and jobs are on the line!  So let’s get real, Jesus.  Whatever Your game is, You can take it somewhere else!  We’ve got our priorities!

Demons may be bad news, but there’s one thing you can say in their favor:  they recognize Reality when they see it.  People, on the other hand, tend to live in a delusional world of their own invention.  These Gerasenes are no exception.  They are exactly like Demetrius the silversmith and his fellow craftsmen who, rather than taking an honest look at what was actually happening in Ephesus, chose to oppose the Gospel in order to protect their business interests (Acts 19:23-28).  They also bear a strong resemblance to the scribes and Pharisees who couldn’t see past the rules and regulations to the wonder of a soul redeemed and a withered hand restored (Mark 3:1-6).  This is Arky conflict of yet another variety.  And it’s all the more subtle in that it presents itself to us under the guise of everyday wisdom and common sense. 

Full Circle:  Verses 18-20

18 As Jesus was getting into the boat, the man who had been demon possessed begged to go with Him. 19 But Jesus said, “No, go home to your family, and tell them everything the Lord has done for you and how merciful He has been. 20 So the man started off to visit the Ten Towns of that region and began to proclaim the great things Jesus had done for him; and everyone was amazed at what he told them. 

Before leaving this side of the lake we should mention that the story doesn’t end here.  Jesus will come back to the Decapolis in Mark 7:31-37.  When He does, He will be playing to a very different crowd.  By that time people will have heard of His reputation as a Healer.  The “multitude” (7:33) will be expecting signs and wonders from Him.  Why the change?  The answer can be found in these last few verses.

For obvious reasons, the healed and restored demoniac wants to be with Jesus.  It’s a phrase that was used in Mark 3:14 with reference to Christ’s calling of the Twelve:  they were selected to be with Him and proclaim the kingdom in His name.  The implication is plain:  this man wants to become an apostle.  He wants to join this band of itinerant preachers.  He longs to be ordained and go into the Gospel ministry.  But Jesus has other plans for him.

“Go home,” He instructs him, “and tell your own people what God has done for you.”  In saying this, Christ returns to the subject of the family, which He had addressed in such shocking terms back in 3:31-35, and redeems it.  In effect, He says, “Once you’ve got your loyalties and affections straight – that is, once you’ve realized that your allegiance is due first and foremost to Me – it’s time to go full circle.  Return to the place of your origins.  Go back to the people who meant the most you in the first place.  If you really want to announce the arrival of My kingdom, start there.  Begin small, as in the Parable of the Growing Seed, and branch out.  That’s where your love and commitment will be most severely tested.  That’s where you can initiate the process of turning the world upside down – one life and one relationship at a time.”

The man did as Jesus told him, and if the events narrated in Chapter 7 are any indication, his witness bore fruit.  As we’ve already hinted, when Jesus returns to the Decapolis, the people’s new-found openness will enable Him to heal a deaf and dumb man.  And that’s not all.  It will be in this same region – “on the other side of the lake,” in the town of Caesarea Philippi – that Peter will make his earth-shaking confession regarding Jesus’ true identity (Mark 8:29), and where Paul will encounter the Living Lord in a blinding light on the Damascus Road (Acts 9:1-9).  Apparently there’s a very real sense in which the liberated demoniac became “the first apostle to the Gentiles.”[ii]                     

Final Thoughts

What’s the upshot of Christ’s encounter with the Powers and Principalities who rule beyond the narrow confines of Jewish religion?  Answer:  it’s nothing we haven’t underscored at least a dozen times before.  Jesus is Lord of all.  His power and authority are absolute and universal.  There is no Word of Command superior to that which we receive from Him; if there is any bowing, serving, and pledging of fidelity to be done, it is to Christ and Christ alone.  As for the rest of them – Potentates and Pigs alike – we owe them nothing but our most careful observance of the Royal Law (James 2:8): the Law of Love (Romans 12:8).                     

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[i] This week’s Scripture quotations come from The New Living Translation. 

[ii] N. T. Wright, Mark for Everyone, p. 57

Review

In our last installment we saw Jesus step away from teaching and into action mode.  No sooner were the final words of the Parable of the Mustard Seed out of His mouth than He turned to the men in the boat beside Him and said, “Let’s cross over to the other side of the lake.”  An interesting proposition. 

That crossing was in itself a kind of test and an adventure in faith for His companions.  Even more importantly, it gave them a fresh demonstration of the incontestable authority (Greek arche, exousia) of Jesus.  Not only is He Lord of the Sabbath, Lord of the Mosaic Law, Lord of Healing and Wholeness, and Lord of Human Relationships.  He’s also Lord of the Wind and Waves – Master of the physical universe.

In the passage that follows we’ll find out what happens when this Wielder of All Authority makes His landing “on the other side.”               

On the Other Side:  Verse 1

5:1 So they arrived at the other side of the lake, in the region of the Gerasenes.[i]

Don’t be confused by the varying place names used in different versions of this story.  Gerasa (modern Jerash) and Gadara (Matthew 8:28) are both cities of the Decapolis, that section of Roman Syria we identified last time as Hellenized Gentile country.[ii]  Apparently Gadara was much closer to the lakeshore (five as opposed to thirty-five miles), so it was probably the location of the incident Mark describes here.  Gerasa, on the other hand,was the bigger town, so it’s possible that its name was used as a generic designation for the entire Decapolis region.  Gergesa may simply be a variant spelling of Gerasa.  Bottom line:  they all pretty much amount to the same thing.     

Whatever the correct name of the place may be, one thing seems certain about Jesus’ landing there:  it makes a statement about authority and territory.  This, I’d suggest, is the ruling concept behind the account that follows. 

This landing is a bit like the landing of the Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock or Neil Armstrong’s landing on the moon.  When Jesus steps out of the boat, it’s as if He’s saying, “I hereby claim this coast for the kingdom of God!”  In effect, He’s taking a dramatic step in the direction of extending His authority into new territory.  He’s asserting His suzerainty on this side of the Lake as well as on the other.  More than that, He’s implying that His kingdom now includes non-Jews as well as Jews.  In other words, He’s claiming to be Lord of all mankind.  Viewed from this perspective, this little scene may well be one of the most significant in the entire Bible.                          

Expect the Unexpected:  Verses 2-6

2 When Jesus climbed out of the boat, a man possessed by an evil spirit came out from the tombs to meet him. 3 This man lived in the burial caves and could no longer be restrained, even with a chain. 4 Whenever he was put into chains and shackles – as he often was – he snapped the chains from his wrists and smashed the shackles.  No one was strong enough to subdue him. 5 Day and night he wandered among the burial caves and in the hills, howling and cutting himself with sharp stones. 6 When Jesus was still some distance away, the man saw him, ran to meet him, and bowed low before him.

Remember our rule of good story-telling?  You narrate a series of events and then ask, “What is the opposite of that?”  Something of the sort is about to unfold.   

In its original Latin derivation, an adventure is something that “comes to meet you.”  It’s the “next thing” to happen, and it isn’t always what you had in mind.  On occasion it can present a very random aspect.  More often than not, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.        

What is it that “comes to meet” Jesus as He disembarks and plants the flag of the kingdom on the Gerasene shore?  Answer:  it’s the opposite of what we might have assumed.  It’s not the Roman governor, a police force, or a defensive army.  Nor is it a group of hungry, needy, disgruntled, and oppressed people in quest of a Liberator.  Any of these might have seemed reasonable given the larger significance of the occasion as we’ve described it.  But no – what actually happens is something entirely different and unexpected. 

As it turns out, the only person who “comes to meet” Jesus is a nobody:  a man without a country, a person without power – a crazed outcast, rejected by society and shunned by his fellow human beings.  In fact, he’s even less than a nobody:  from the Jewish perspective, he’s about as “unclean” and “untouchable” as a person can possibly be, living, as he does, in a graveyard in close proximity to the dead.  Worst of all, he’s clearly dangerous:  wild, unbelievably strong, and possessed by a demon or “evil spirit.”  

Here’s the most unexpected part of all:  as soon as this man sees Jesus, he comes running towards Him.  It’s as if this insane demoniac is irresistibly drawn to Christ, magnetically attracted by His presence.  To top things off, as he approaches, he “bows low” or prostrates himself before the Master.  The Greek verb used here is one we normally find in the sense of worship.  What does it all mean?    

Arky Conflict of a Different Kind:  Verses 7-9

7 With a shriek, he screamed, “Why are you interfering with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?  In the name of God, I beg you, don’t torture me!” 8 For Jesus had already said to the spirit, “Come out of the man, you evil spirit.” 9 Then Jesus demanded, “What is your name?”  And he replied, “My name is Legion, because there are many of us inside this man.”   

I don’t think we can resolve that question without first mustering up the courage to confront a more fundamental problem – a problem that presents nagging difficulties for many modern readers of the Gospels.  What exactly are demons and why do they get so much air-play in the New Testament texts?  I’m going to suggest that the answer is primarily a matter of authority and territory. 

If we gather together in one hand all the various strands of biblical revelation on this topic that we’ve been pondering over the past two or three years – particularly the material we’ve gleaned from our studies in the book of Revelation – I think we will find ourselves driven to an inevitable conclusion.  As was already noted in an earlier installment, the “demons” or “evil spirits” of the Gospels are something far more significant and imposing than the wicked imps, goblins, or bogeys we often imagine them to be.  They are in fact the archai and exousiai who wield dominion over this fallen world: the “rulers, powers, world forces of darkness, the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places” that Paul describes in Ephesians 6:12.  In the language of Vernard Eller, they are the Arkys within the arkys; the brains behind the governments, traditions, institutions, organizations, and establishments that are “out to control us.”  They are the unseen, supernatural puppeteers behind the visible, mortal, human puppets. 

We have already seen Jesus engage in a number of different Arky conflicts.  What we have in this passage is an Arky conflict of another kind:  a direct, visceral, unmediated Arky conflict.  Instead of Pharisees, priests, scribes, magistrates, officials, or family patriarchs, Jesus here finds Himself confronted with a whole legion of invisible “world rulers” who have assumed immediate control of a single individual human being.  This is the kind of thing we can expect to run into on “the other side of the lake”: a conflict which, precisely by virtue of its less “civilized”, less “respectable”, less orderly and formalized nature, is all the more raw and real.

This passage shows us two things about these demonic Arkys.  First, because authority (exousia) is what they’re all about – a part of their essential nature – they recognize and bow before ultimate authority when they see it.  Though they regard Jesus as an enemy, they nevertheless acknowledge Him for who He is: “Son of the Most High God” (a term that would have carried a special significance for Gentiles as well as Jews). As a result, they tremble before Him as their uncontested Master (James 2:19).

Second, these demons understand the connection between authority and territory.  It’s true that one of the commentators I’ve been reading makes the statement, “There is little clear evidence that demons operate in specific geographical areas and that their relocation to other areas renders them powerless in their initial area of operation.”[iii] But in making this assertion, this writer is forgetting our cardinal point:  that demons are not simply troublesome, mischievous sprites, but rather powerful subordinates of “the Bent Oyarsa,”[iv] representatives of the illegitimate Prince of the Power of the Air.  As we have noted elsewhere (see the entry on Mark 2:10-11, “Authority”), they include among their ranks “the Prince of the kingdom of Persia” (Daniel 10:13), “the Prince of Greece” (Daniel 10:20), and “the King of the South” (Daniel 11:5).  They are in fact the angelic powers who stand behind the human rulers of this world, and as such they have very definite connections with the “sovereign powers” we normally associate with nations, states, institutions, organizations, corporations, and other localized entities.  Like dogs, they are possessed of highly territorial instincts and will fight viciously to protect their respective domains.                        

Turf Wars:  Verse 10

10 Then the evil spirits begged him again and again not to send them to some distant place.

That last phrase – “to some distant place” – is the NLT’s rendering of three Greek words (exo tes choras) that literally mean “out of the region or territory.”  This plea on the part of the evil spirits reflects and underscores the point I’ve just been trying to make. It connects these Arkys with what we might describe as a very specific form of “regionalism.”  Jesus is Lord of the universe.  Archai and exousiai, on the other hand, are renegade usurpers, rogue barons who exercise a limited authority over a proscribed region or territory which God has permitted them to dominate for the time being.  They are fiercely possessive, but also cravenly fearful. Accordingly, it is out of both dread and jealousy that they speak when they beg Jesus not to “send them to some distant place.”  In effect, they are saying to Him, “This is our territory!  This side of the lake belongs to us!”  But it doesn’t – not any more.              

Final Thoughts

We’ll have more to say about all this when we cover the second half of this story in verses 11-20.  But for now we can close with a very simple thought.  The idea that demons are territorial is perhaps of little significance to most of us – a piece of “Bible trivia” at best.  On the other hand, the realization that territorialism is demonic – well, that’s a different issue altogether. 

What are we really saying when we make statements like, “This is my place, my town, my neighborhood, my bailiwick, my country, and you don’t belong here!  I’m king of this hill!”  What are we doing when we try to defend our “rights” by translating this kind of petulant whining into official policy and government legislation?  Could we be echoing the perspective of the “world rulers” whose only goal is to advance their own agenda in defiance of the One who comes to establish His kingdom on “their side of the lake”? 

It’s a possibility worth considering. 

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[i] This week’s Scripture quotations come from The New Living Translation. 

[ii] Eckhard Schnabel, The Tyndale Commentary on Mark, p. 116.

[iii] Schnabel, p. 119. 

[iv] C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet. 

Review

Can you believe it?  We’ve been studying Mark’s Gospel together for about twenty weeks (including the time we spent in meetings at my house before the COVID-19 crisis began)!  Maybe it’s time to pause for a few moments and take stock.  Where have we come from?  What have we seen?  Where are we now, and where are we headed?  Here’s an overview. 

We’ve talked about the advent of the Arche of the Good News of Jesus Christ (1:1) – the only authority to which any of us owe absolute allegiance and obedience.  As a matter of fact, we’ve said that authority and allegiance are key themes in the Gospel of Mark.  Accordingly, we’ve seen this Arche step onto the stage of the world and into direct and immediate conflict with other “arkys” or “principles of governance” that want to control us:  family, tradition, the state, civil government, and the religious establishment to name a few.  We’ve seen Jesus confront each one of these “arkys” with His bold claim to unrivaled sovereignty.  We’ve watched Him demonstrate His dominion over every competitor, from physical illness to demonic “powers and principalities” (Ephesians 6:12) to the Law of Moses to natural family ties.  And we’ve heard Him articulate His message of the kingdom through a series of parables and analogies – parables that underscore the ironic, ambiguous, subtle, paradoxical, and irrepressible nature of the kingdom of God. 

Now it’s time for Jesus to stop teaching for a while and shift back into action mode.  In the passages that follow, He will once again show us by way of His mighty deeds how the principles set forth in the parables apply to the real world.  This shift of emphasis is important, for as the apostle Paul says, “The kingdom of God does not consist in words, but in power” (1 Corinthians 4:5).              

New Horizons:  Verses 35-36

35 On the same day, when evening had come, He said to them, “Let us cross over to the other side.” 36 Now when they had left the multitude, they took Him along in the boat as He was.  And other little boats were also with Him.[i]

Up to this point, Jesus’ ministry has taken place primarily in and around Capernaum, a town on the northwest shore of Lake Galilee.  At this point in the narrative the Master has just finished presenting a series of parables from His seat in a fishing boat at the edge of the lake.  As the crowd disperses and the sun sinks below the horizon, He says to His companions, “Let’s cross over to the other side.”  It seems like a small thing, but it’s the launching point for the next episode, and it’s worth pausing over for several reasons.

First, as my friend Richard Harris (a “remote” member of our group since the beginning of the pandemic) has reminded me, this word of Jesus deserves notice because “this is what He told them to do and they, in obedience, went about it.”[ii]  They might have balked, but they didn’t.  Their unquestioning cooperation is perhaps all the more remarkable in that Jesus doesn’t tell them what He intends to do on the other side of the lake or why He wants to go there now, with darkness coming on.  The disciples probably thought it was a crazy idea, but they put out from shore anyway.  And that’s a good thing.  Apparently they were already learning that Jesus sometimes asks us to do unreasonable things.      

Second, any objections they might have expressed would have been more than justified.  Violent storms are frequent occurrences on Lake Galilee.  As N. T. Wright explains, “To this day, the car parks on the western shore have signs warning drivers of what happens in high winds.  The sea can get very rough very quickly, and big waves can swamp cars parked on what looked like a safe beach.”[iii]  It’s true that Peter and his fellow fishermen often plied their trade at night despite the threat of sudden squalls; but they probably kept fairly close to land in case of emergencies.  In any case, it’s almost certain that they would never have considered sailing all the way over to the southeast shore – a distance of about ten miles – at night and in the dark.  That’s something they probably wouldn’t have done at any time.

This leads to the third point.  “The other side” was not friendly territory.  It was Gentile country – part of the Decapolis or “Ten Towns,” a loose coalition of Hellenistic cities operating under the suzerainty of the Roman Empire and forming a part of the Province of Syria.  We’ll come back to this when we talk about what happened after Jesus got there.  But for now it’s worth mentioning that the apostle Paul wasn’t the first to come up with the idea of evangelizing non-Jews.  Here, in the very earliest stages of His ministry, it’s Jesus Himself who makes the decision to take the message of the kingdom to “those other people.”  And in so doing He strikes a fatal blow at spiritually sanctioned jingoism, separatism, racism, ethno-centrism, and nationalistic loyalty.  Biblically speaking, if any group of people ever possessed the slightest justification for such loyalties and prejudices, it was the Israelites, the Chosen (by the way, Americans aren’t even in the running).  But Jesus nips this kind of thing in the bud when He says, “Let’s cross over to the other side.”                  

Finally, as Richard has also pointed out, part of the irony of the situation lies in the fact that the disciples’ unexpressed misgivings prove to be well-founded.  As it happens, they do run into a storm.  It’s a bad one, too, with violent winds whipping down from the Golan Heights, stirring up waves more than sufficient to overwhelm a twenty-five to thirty-foot fishing boat.  As it turned out, “The thing they feared had overtaken them” (Job 3:25).  If they’d had the presence of mind, they might have said to Jesus, “We knew it would turn out this way!”  The point, as Richard expresses it, is that “sometimes when God tells us to do something, we will encounter problems.”  This is part of the irony and ambiguity of the kingdom.  There are no guarantees.                   

Asleep in the Storm:  Verses 37-38

37 And a great windstorm arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that it was already filling. 38 But He was in the stern, asleep on a pillow.  And they awoke Him and said to Him, “Teacher, do You not care that we are perishing?”

I just said, “There are no guarantees.”  I’m going to take that back.  There is one.  Just one.  And it is the guarantee that Jesus Himself will be with us no matter what kind of problems or storms we may encounter (Hebrews 13:5).  What’s more, He isn’t worried about the situation.  It’s of no great concern to Him how bad it looks.  He’s there, sleeping on a pillow in the stern, for all the world like a child who doesn’t know the meaning of words like “danger”, “death”, “fear”, or “responsibility”.  These things don’t exist for Him, because, as God, He is Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End, the Author and Creator of all things.  But it would be equally correct to say that these things don’t exist for Him because, as a human being, He has perfect confidence in the watch-care of His Father. 

In this, Jesus does not differ from you or me.  Theoretically speaking, we can have that same confidence.  And yet, as we know all too well, He is in fact very different from us in this regard, for most of us (myself at the top of the list) find it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to exercise that kind of trust.  In fact, we don’t understand it.  From our perspective, to sleep in the midst of the storm is dereliction of duty.  After all, it’s our job to fret and fume when things get tough.  If we don’t do it, who will?  Certainly not Jesus.

And so the disciples, in a flush of righteous indignation, actually rebuke Jesus.  They call Him on the carpet and blame Him for His “lackadaisical” attitude.  “Don’t you care that we are going to die?” they shout.  He’s there, He’s with them in the situation, yet they still feel entitled to accuse Him of not caring.  It’s a familiar scenario.                    

“I can almost see Peter standing there, with a spare bucket ready to hand it to Jesus – as if to say, ‘The least you can do is help us bail the boat!’  Peter and the others had an idea of how they were going to save themselves and they wanted Jesus to help them with their plan.  That’s just how we are.  We have our own plans, and our prayers are asking God to endorse and cooperate with them.  ‘Oh God, we say, here is my strategy, now won’t you bless it?  I know it’s a really good idea!’  We presume to tell God how he should manage our problems.  But of course, God is not limited by our imaginations, nor is he obliged to respect our comfort zone.”[iv]                  

The Word of Authority:  Verse 39

39 Then He arose and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Peace, be still!”  And the wind ceased and there was a great calm.    

But Jesus doesn’t need a bailing scoop.  Neither is He concerned with our well-laid plans for survival and self-deliverance.  There’s just one thing He requires, and it’s the very thing we’ve been talking about ever since we started studying Mark’s Gospel some twenty weeks ago:  the Authority He wields as the Absolute, Indisputably Sovereign Arky of God.  There’s a sense in which the book of Mark is all about this Authority.  And Jesus demonstrates it here in a powerful, unforgettable way.          

To the storm He says, “Peace!  Be still!”  Or, in Wright’s translation, “Silence!  Shut up!”  And instantly there is a “great calm.”  

N. T. Wright introduces his discussion of this passage by saying, “This tale … isn’t just about danger and rescue.”[v]  He’s right.  More than anything else, it’s about the irrefutable Authority of Jesus.  And the context in which it makes its claim is all the more powerful by reason of its associations with profound and ancient biblical imagery. 

The sea, for ancient Israelites, was always a place of dark, primal evil:  the home of monsters (e.g., Isaiah 27:1; Revelation 13:1); the source of tumults and disasters (Psalm 65:7); an obstacle and an enemy to be conquered, parted, and pushed aside by the power of the Lord (Exodus 14:21).  The readers of Mark’s narrative, like the disciples in the boat, would have had all this at the back of their minds as they heard the wind roar and saw the waves pounding against the bulwarks of the ship.  And when the storm fell still at Jesus’ command, they could not have failed to remember passages such as Psalm 89:9 (“Thou dost rule the swelling of the sea; when its waves rise, Thou dost still them”) or Psalm 107:29 (“He caused the storm to be still, so that the waves of the sea were hushed”).  The implications would have been inescapable.                      

Fear and Fear:  Verses 40-41

40 But He said to them, “Why are you so fearful?  How is it that you have no faith?” 41 And they feared exceedingly, and said to one another, “Who can this be, that even the wind and the sea obey Him!”

“Who can this be?”  My friend Richard says that this is one of the profoundest questions in the entire Bible:  a question that cuts to the heart of who we are and what our lives in this world are all about.  Who indeed is this Jesus who, on the one hand, looks, acts, and sounds like one of us, and yet, on the other hand, rules the forces of nature by the power of His word?  According to the testimony of the Scriptures, there is only one possible answer:  He must be God in the flesh:  YHWH Himself. 

No wonder the fear they felt in the presence of the forces of mere nature (Greek deilia, a “cringing cowardice”) is transformed on the spot into the dread and awe (Greek phobos, “a fear which inspires flight”) that we all must experience when suddenly confronted with the reality of the Supernatural – what Rudolf Otto calls the “Numinous”[vi].  According to Otto, it is this elemental “creature feeling” – the only appropriate response to an encounter with the Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans[vii] – that forms the foundation of all true spiritual experience and changes our day-to-day existence into a never-ending adventure.

And no wonder Jesus chides them, though ever so gently, with the words, “How is it that you have no faith?”  How indeed?  Given everything they’d seen – and everything we’ve read – up to this point, they should have known better.  But they didn’t.  Somehow or other, they still didn’t get it.  And they wouldn’t for some time to come.    

Final Thoughts

I’m going to give my friend Richard the last word on this week’s study:

“Who is this God we follow?  The answer to that question is of paramount importance.  Is He really who He claims to be:  the maker of trillions of stars, untold worlds across the universe, sovereign of the trillions of cells in each of our bodies; the one who knows every hair on our head by its number, all 100,000 of them, ours and all eight billion others with whom we share this little blue planet?  Who is this, that all these things obey Him?  Ought we not, as the old hymn goes ‘Trust and obey, for there’s no other way, to be happy in Jesus, than to trust and obey?’”

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[i] This week’s Scripture quotations are taken from The New King James Version. 

[ii] I should mention right up front that I’m indebted to Richard for a number of excellent insights into the deeper implications of this passage.

[iii] N. T. Wright, Mark for Everyone, p. 51.

[iv] More from Richard.

[v] Wright, p. 51.

[vi] Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, Chapter II, “Numen and the Numinous.”

[vii] Ibid., Chapter IV, “Mysterium Tremendum.”

Review

In the verses we’re about to read Jesus continues to teach the people by way of parables and analogies; and, as in the previous passage, we’re given some explanatory information about His reasons for speaking in this way and what He hopes to accomplish by casting His message into this enigmatic form. 

As I mentioned last time, I have a feeling that most of us have heard these stories so many times before that we’ve become numb to their impact.  To compound the problem, far too much preaching, teaching, and Bible commentary seems to consist in repeating platitudes and pointing out the obvious.  I’d like to avoid that if possible.  So on this occasion I won’t attempt to say everything that could be said about this section.  Instead, I’ll limit myself to a few key observations that may not lie quite so close to the surface.

The theme here, as I understand it, is the irrepressible nature of the kingdom of God:  in other words, the idea that the kingdom is coming and will come of its own accord, no matter what people do to promote or oppose it.  I believe this to be an extremely important idea.

Hidden to Be Revealed:  Verses 21-25

21 He also said to them, “Is a lamp brought in to be put under a basket or under a bed?  Isn’t it to be put on a lampstand? 22 For nothing is concealed except to be revealed, and nothing hidden except to come to light. 23 If anyone has ears to hear, he should listen!” 24 Then He said to them, “Pay attention to what you hear.  By the measure you use, it will be measured and added to you. 25 For to the one who has, it will be given, and from the one who does not have, even what he has will be taken away.”[i]

Let’s start with light.  It’s the nature and purpose of light to shine.  Like truth, the light will eventually out.  You don’t put a light under a basket because that would be absurd; but if you were to try, you’d probably have a hard time keeping it concealed.  Inevitably, some of the light-beams would seep through the seams of the basket.  That’s because light is one of the most irrepressible of all physical phenomena.

That’s how it is with Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom.  When He speaks to the crowds, He veils some of the disturbing brilliance of His message by expressing it in parables, similes, and metaphors.  But the light of the kingdom will eventually out.  That’s the nature of the thing.

This leads us to the most important point.  Why does Jesus put the light under the bushel?  Why does He use enigmatic language?  The answer comes in the form of another paradox.  The Greek particle hina, which is used twice in verse 22, functions grammatically to express purpose.  According to this sentence, the truth is concealed precisely so that it may be revealed.  “The present hiddenness serves the purpose of revelation.”[ii] 

What’s intriguing about this is that it appears to contradict what Jesus told His disciples back in 4:12.  At that point in the narrative He claimed to be using parables “in order that (hina)” His listeners might not see, hear, understand, and repent.  In other words, His purpose in that instance was to keep the message hidden.  How do these two ideas fit together?

There are probably lots of ways to interpret this.  I’m going to suggest one possible approach.  Perhaps Jesus is talking here about the two phases of a single painful process.  First, the light is hidden so that people become confused.  Once confused, they begin to grope for answers.  They lose their bearings.  A cold shadow of doubt falls across long-held assumptions and presumptions; as, for example, the idea that the kingdom of God is essentially a nationalistic-political proposition, or that Jesus has come to advance my agenda.  As a result, a sense of disillusion and disorientation sets in.  Faced with my own cluelessness, I become desperate.  I realize my need for a Savior, Teacher, and Guide.      

In the second part of the process, when the mind has been stripped of all its pre-conceived notions, the way becomes clear for the advent of the light.  Having been thrown for a loop by Jesus’ odd word-pictures, the humbled listener is now prepared to see and hear the truth for what it really is.  It’s a bit like Marine boot-camp training:  the sergeant dismantles and “deconstructs” his recruits in order that he might build them back up again in the image of the Corps.  In the same way, Jesus pulls the rug out from under us in order that He may set us on our feet.

This, I believe, is what He has in mind when He says “To the one who has, it will be given, and from the one who does not have, even what he has will be taken away.”  Those who know what it means to cling to Christ in utter dependency are granted the keys to the kingdom (Matthew 16:19).  But if we persist in leaning on our own understanding and promoting our own agenda (Proverbs 3:5), our darkness will only increase.  

Automatic Growth:  Verses 26-29

26 ”The kingdom of God is like this,” He said.  “A man scatters seed on the ground; 27 he sleeps and rises – night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows – he doesn’t know how. 28 The soil produces a crop by itself – first the blade, then the head, and then the ripe grain on the head. 29 But as soon as the crop is ready, he sends for the sickle, because harvest has come.”

Like the shining of the light, the growth of the seed is a thing that happens of its own accord.  The people of Jesus’ time thought they could do something to usher in the kingdom of God.  The Pharisees, for example, prayed and fasted.  The Zealots plotted and stockpiled weapons.  The Herodians made deals and got on the good side of powerful political arkys.  In the same way, Christians today study demographics, utilize Search Engine Optimization, plan evangelistic rallies, implement advertising and marketing techniques, devise fund-raising strategies, or elect presidents who seem likely to appoint certain judges to the Supreme Court.  But it’s all for nothing. 

Why?  Because despite our power, our prestige, our smarts, our savvy, and all of our technical expertise, we really have no idea how the kingdom grows.  Like the farmer who plants the seed and waits, we have no control whatsoever over the humanly incomprehensible Phenomenon that Jesus has set in motion.  In the original language, this kingdom, like the seed, is said to grow automate – “of itself.”  And there’s nothing we can do to hinder or promote the process.  It’s an independent, self-determined, irrepressible force.  Our role is to listen, pay attention, and make sure we’re on the right side of things when the sickle comes in for the harvest.

Small Is Beautiful:  Verses 30-32

30 And He said:  “How can we illustrate the kingdom of God, or what parable can we use to describe it? 31 It’s like a mustard seed that, when sown in the soil, is smaller than all the seeds on the ground. 32 And when sown, it comes up and grows taller than all the vegetables, and produces large branches, so that the birds of the sky can nest in its shade.”  

What will this growing seed become once it reaches full maturity?  This, at first glance, appears to be what the Parable of the Mustard Seed is all about.  N. T. Wright suggests that it is intended to teach us “not to look down on small beginnings.”[iii]  Jesus’ ministry among the peasants of Galilee may seem insignificant now, but just you wait:  in time it will blossom into an Empire of political as well as spiritual dimensions and implications.  It will become a plant with branches big enough for the “birds of the air” to take refuge in its shade.  Ezekiel (17:23; 31:6) and Daniel (4:12, 21) employed the same imagery to communicate this same idea of expansion and power. 

There is, of course, much to be said in favor of Wright’s idea.  After all, this same Jesus who has come to us in the guise of the Suffering Servant is destined to re-appear as the truly Benevolent Despot of a borderless universal domain.  Nevertheless, I’d like to propose that another vital truth lies “hidden” in the simple lines of this parable – a truth we ignore to our own disadvantage. 

In 1973 E. F. Schumacher, Chief Economic Advisor to the British National Coal Board from 1950 to 1970, wrote a profound little book on economics called Small Is Beautiful.  The principle expressed in Schumacher’s title is of eminent importance to this discussion.  While it’s true that Jesus’ ministry and its “small beginnings” will eventually “prove to be of ultimate, far-reaching significance,”[iv] it’s equally worth bearing in mind that smallness is to be valued for its own sake.  It is, in fact, an indispensable part of the kingdom’s inner workings.  It’s the fuel as well as the mechanism that makes the whole thing run.  It’s the answer to the question, “How does the seed grow?” 

We’re discovering this truth all over again in the age of pandemic-induced restrictions.  The church may be “essential,” as some disgruntled Christians have asserted in the face of social distancing measures, but bigness isn’t.  Perhaps the Lord is using the coronavirus to cure us of our characteristically American misconception that “kingdom success” is measured in terms of the Mega-Church.  God has a very different way of working.  Life and growth are miraculous, supernatural gifts that we receive from His hand alone.  And He grants these gifts in the small, secret places where the tiny but irrepressible seed grows of its own accord.    

Final Thoughts:  “Not Without Parables”:  Verses 33-34

33 He would speak the word to them with many parables like these, as they were able to understand. 34 And He did not speak to them without a parable.  Privately, however, He would explain everything to His own disciples.

This section concludes with a reiteration of the principle articulated back in 4:10-12:  for “outsiders”, parables; for “insiders”, plain language.  But at this point in the journey we have an even clearer conception of the clientele of these two groups.  “Outsiders”, as we can now see, are those who plunge themselves even deeper into misunderstanding and darkness by leaning on their own wisdom and promoting their own agenda; whereas “insiders” emerge from darkness into light by embracing their own inadequacy, hitching their cart to the irrepressible “automatic” power of the kingdom, and clinging to the Savior’s outstretched hand.      

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[i] This week’s Scripture quotations are take from The Holman Christian Standard Bible. 

[ii] Schnabel, The Tyndale New Testament Commentary on Mark, p. 107.

[iii] Wright, Mark for Everyone, p. 50.

[iv] Schnabel, p. 110.

Review

Thus far Mark’s narrative has been filled with lots of fast-paced action:  healings, exorcisms, and plenty of “arky conflict” in the form of dramatic confrontations between Christ and the Powers that Be.  In this section we step into what one commentator calls “the first main block of Jesus’ teaching.”[i]  In Chapter 4 the Master returns to His central message of The Kingdom of God, explicating it by way of three parables and two analogies.  The first of these parables is perhaps the most famous of them all:  the Parable of the Sower, the Seed, and the Soils.         

The Subtlety of Seed and Soils:  Verses 1-9

1 And He began to teach again by the seashore.  And such a very great multitude gathered before Him that He got into a boat in the sea and sat down; and all the multitude were by the seashore on the land. 2 And He was teaching them many things in parables, and was saying to them in His teaching, 3 “Listen to this!  Behold, the sower went out to sow; 4 and it came about that as he was sowing, some seed fell beside the road, and the birds came and ate it up. 5 And other seed fell on the rocky ground where it did not have much soil; and immediately it sprang up because it had no depth of soil. 6 And after the sun had risen, it was scorched; and because it had no root, it withered away. 7 And other seed fell among the thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no crop. 8 And other seeds fell into the good soil and as they grew up and increased, they were yielding a crop and were producing thirty, sixty, and a hundredfold.” 9 And He was saying, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”[ii]           

So much has been written, preached, and taught on this parable that it almost seems presumptuous to try to add anything to the discussion.  But a few salient points may be worth mentioning.

First, it’s difficult to divide this passage into smaller segments.  The section hangs together as a whole:  Jesus gives us the parable, then provides the interpretation; and sandwiched in between these two inseparable halves of the discourse He offers some explosive comments on the purpose of His parables in general and how they work.  It seems important to keep all this together.

The story Jesus sketches out for us here is so straightforward and familiar as to seem almost banal.  Most of us have heard it so many times that we could recite it and its interpretation in our sleep.  Nevertheless, as with most of Christ’s teaching, there are things about this parable that aren’t readily apparent to the eye; and, as usual, it’s these hidden gems that merit the most attention. 

As we’ve already indicated, the parable is designed to give us a picture of the coming of the Kingdom.  This was a subject of great concern to all of Jesus’ listeners:  everybody from the common folk to the tax collectors to the Pharisees to the politically potent Herodians and Romans.  Each of these groups had ideas, hopes, dreams, fears, and expectations of its own connected with the coming of the Kingdom.  What’s significant about Jesus’ representation of the matter is that it doesn’t match any of these popularly held notions. 

Most people looked for the Kingdom to arrive in a sudden flash.  The Messiah would appear, marshal His forces, oust the enemies and oppressors, and instantly establish God’s reign on earth.  It would be a top-down, overnight, indisputable military and political victory – a sudden paradigm shift at which every knee would bow, just as Paul assures us it will be at the end of the age (Philippians 2:10, 11).  That’s what the Jews were hoping for – a hope very much like that entertained by many American evangelicals today.  That’s the vision that caused the Roman overlords so much unease and gave them so many sleepless nights.  But it’s not the scene that Jesus envisions here.

As Jesus sees it, the coming of the Kingdom is not the result of military or political conquest, but of the sowing of the Word.  And it is anything but sudden, stark, instantaneous, total, and undeniable.  On the contrary, it can be more accurately described in terms of a series of modifiers we’ve used before:  ironic, ambiguous, subtle, and paradoxical.  Instead of an overnight victory, “It’s more like a farmer sowing seed, much of which apparently goes to waste because the soil isn’t fit for it, can’t sustain it.”[iii] It does not come with its own set of unanswerable self-validating proofs.  Some see what’s happening and respond positively.  Others simply don’t get it.  Not a particularly hopeful scenario from the perspective of the average Messianic enthusiast.               

Paradoxical Purpose:  Verses 10-12

10 And as soon as He was alone, His followers, along with the twelve, began asking Him about the parables. 11 And He was saying to them, “To you has been given the mystery of the kingdom of God; but those who are outside get everything in parables; 12 in order that WHILE SEEING, THEY MAY SEE AND NOT PERCEIVE; AND WHILE HEARING, THEY MAY HEAR AND NOT UNDERSTAND; LEST THEY RETURN AGAIN AND BE FORGIVEN.”   

By way of explanation – or perhaps consolation – Jesus now gives His closest followers – and us – a primer on the subject of parables.  And here again the words that come most readily to mind are paradox and ambiguity.

The typical Sunday-school definition of a “parable” is “an earthly story with a heavenly meaning.”  A parable, we are often led to believe, is a “helpful illustration” of a spiritual truth expressed in an easily accessible narrative form.  It’s a teaching device calculated to “put the cookies on the bottom shelf,” as a colleague of mine used to express it.  But that’s not what Jesus says here. 

According to Jesus, a parable has the effect of dividing insiders from outsiders – an idea that surfaced last week in the story of Christ’s mother and brothers.  What’s worse, a parable is actually designed to conceal the truth rather than revealing it.  Jesus backs this up with a quotation from the prophet Isaiah (6:9-10).  He asserts that “outsiders” get the message “in parables” in order that “they may see and not see, hear and not hear.”  He expressly tells us that the purpose behind all this is that they should not “repent and be forgiven.”            

Some commentators have called this “one of the most difficult passages in the New Testament.”  It certainly isn’t easy to understand – at least not according to our normal categories of biblical interpretation.  “Doesn’t Jesus want everybody to get the message?” asks Wright.  The answer, he suggests, is “Yes and no.”  Why?  Because “what He is saying is such dynamite that it can’t be said straightforwardly, out on the street.”  It’s something so “subversive and unexpected” that it has to be communicated in a “code” that only insiders will fully be able to grasp.[iv]

We may not be able to wrap our brains around this concept – at least not apart from a long and hard process of careful and prayerful contemplation.  But there’s one thing we can say with certainty:  this is not a good marketing strategy.  Unlike Henry Ford and Steve Jobs, Jesus does not “try to figure out what consumers are going to want and then find a way to give it to them.”  Instead, He “puts the cookies on the highest shelf of all” – almost beyond their reach.  He makes us stretch until we’re almost ready to break; for it’s only at that point that we’ll be ready to cast ourselves upon His grace.           

Diversity and Division:  Verses 13-20

13 And He said to them, “Do you not understand this parable?  And how will you understand all the parables? 14 The sower sows the word. 15 And these are the ones who are beside the road where the word is sown; and when they hear, immediately Satan comes and takes away the word which has been sown in them. 16 And in a similar way these are the ones on whom seed was sown on the rocky places, who, when they hear the word, immediately receive it with joy; 17 and they have no firm root in themselves, but are only temporary; then, when affliction or persecution arises because of the word, immediately they fall away. 18 And others are the ones on whom seed was sown among the thorns; these are the ones who have heard the word, 19 and the worries of the world, and the deceitfulness of riches, and the desires for other things enter in and choke the word, and it becomes unfruitful. 20 And those are the ones on whom seed was sown on the good ground; and they hear the word and accept it, and bear fruit, thirty, sixty, and a hundredfold. 

Obviously there’s a great deal that could be said about this interpretation of the parable.  I’m going to limit myself to a single reflection.  In contrast to first-century Jewish expectations, the coming of the Kingdom, on Jesus’ representation, does not lead to some sort of instantaneous “theocratic solidarity”; “one nation under God,” if you will.  Instead, it produces even more division and confusion.  Of the four types of soil identified in the story, only one receives the seed of the Word and grows an abundant crop.  The rest fail to respond.  And there’s nothing that the Sower or you or I or anybody else can do about it.

Final Thoughts 

This, then, is Christ’s portrayal of the Kingdom’s arrival on earth.  It’s not a picture of a monolithic “Christian Empire” where eternal truths are universally accepted, where God enjoys the backing of the White House and the Supreme Court, and where everybody shares a common commitment to “traditional biblical values.”  Instead, it’s a picture of a small but potent force surviving, thriving, and pushing its way to the surface through hostility, adversity, and widespread diversity.  This is our situation today.  It’s the environment in which we must learn to function in this “already-but-not-yet” period of our Christian experience.           

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[i] Schnabel, The Tyndale New Testament Commentary on Mark, p. 98.

[ii] This week’s Scripture quotations are taken from the New American Standard Bible. 

[iii] N. T. Wright, Mark for Everyone, p. 43.

[iv] Ibid., p. 44.

Review

Our discussion of Mark 3:7-19 was dominated by the themes of irony and opposites.  We could re-state this by saying that the events narrated in that passage were characterized by a certain degree of ambiguity:  a quality that is also highly descriptive of our personal lives as followers of Jesus in this “already-but-not-yet” period “between the Ages.”  We’ll find this same ambiguity – mingled with appropriate measures of frustration, adversity, misunderstanding, and disappointment – running through the section that follows.           

Labels:  Verses 20-22

20 Now Jesus went home, and a crowd gathered so that they were not able to eat. 21 When his family heard this they went out to restrain Him, for they said, “He is out of His mind.” 22 The experts in the law who came down from Jerusalem said, “He is possessed by Beelzebul,” and, “By the ruler of demons he casts out demons.”     

Jesus has taken a dramatic and revolutionary step forward by choosing twelve apostles to “be with Him” and join Him in the task of proclaiming the arrival of God’s kingdom – a clear sign of progress in the advancement of His mission.  So what is the opposite of that?  The answer, of course, is more resistance.

At this juncture the resistance comes from a couple of arkys we’ve encountered before:  the family and the religious establishment.  In Jesus’ day, these two powers or principalities went hand in hand.  They represented two related sub-aspects of an even greater allegiance, an overarching loyalty that could not possibly brook the claims of a powerful rival like Jesus:  loyalty to the nation Israel as the People of God. 

In this instance, the opposition offered by these two arkys assumes a particular form:  labeling.  A savvy choice on the part of Christ’s adversaries.  A disturbing phenomenon like Jesus is almost impossible to understand, much less control, if you can’t fit it into a recognizable category.  As long as it’s permitted to run wild, free, and undefined, you have to face it honestly and deal with it on its own terms.  But if you can cram it into a pre-fabricated box of some kind, it becomes fairly easy to dismiss.  That’s what’s happening here.  Jesus’ family attempts to take Him in hand by calling Him “crazy”.  The spiritual authorities claim He’s “in league with the devil.”  After that, it’s a done deal.  There’s nothing more to say. 

This is a timely topic.  At present this tactic of name-calling is being employed with great effect by prominent people on both sides of every imaginable aisle.  If you’re uncomfortable with what someone stands for, you call him a “terrorist” or a “liberal”.  Case closed.  If a magazine prints something you don’t like, you label it “left-wing” or “reactionary” and toss it in the trash.  No need to do the hard work of reading, listening, thinking, or responding.  In the same way, if you find Jesus strange, unsettling, unorthodox, or challenging, don’t bother to ask why.  Just say, “He’s nuts.”  Just broad-brush Him as a “sorcerer”.  That will take care of the problem.  Then you can go about your business with a clear conscience.

Facing the Obvious:  Verses 23-27

23 So He called them and spoke to them in parables:  “How can Satan cast out Satan? 24 If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom will not be able to stand. 25 If a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. 26 And if Satan rises against himself and is divided, he is not able to stand and his end has come. 27 But no one is able to enter a strong man’s house and steal his property unless he first ties up the strong man.  Then he can thoroughly plunder his house.”    

Jesus, of course, is not a wacko or a Satanist.  He’s the Word of God Incarnate, the Arky above all arkys.  And His response to this kind of talk is consistent with His divine nature and character.  He cuts through the name-calling by drawing His accusers’ attention to the plain facts.  In His own inimitable style, He says, “Don’t you see what’s happening?  Evil is in retreat!  The darkness is being pushed back!  The enemy is on the run!  Do you think any of this is his doing?  Can’t you tell the difference between good and bad when you see it?” 

In other words, Jesus resorts here to an image and an argument He often used in cases of this kind:  A tree is known by its fruit.      

No Way Out :  Verses 28-30

28 “I tell you the truth, people will be forgiven for all sins, even all the blasphemies they utter. 29 But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven, but is guilty of an eternal sin” 30 (because they said, “He has an unclean spirit”).

With this we step straight into the age-old question of the “unforgivable sin”:  “Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.”  Controversial though it may be, Jesus’ pronouncement here really isn’t as difficult to understand as it seems – not if we read it in context.  As N. T. Wright explains, “It isn’t that God gets specially angry with one sin in particular.  It’s rather that if you decide firmly that the doctor who is offering to perform a life-saving operation on you is in fact a sadistic murderer, you will never give your consent to the operation.”[i]  To say it another way, if you kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, you’re out of luck.  If you demonize the Redeemer, there’s no one left to redeem you (see Hebrews 6:6; 10:26).  You’ve painted yourself into a corner with no way out. 

Redefining the Family:  Verses 31-35

 31 Then Jesus’ mother and his brothers came.  Standing outside they sent word to Him, to summon Him. 32 A crowd was sitting around Him and they said to Him, “Look, your mother and your brothers are outside looking for you.” 33 He answered them and said, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” 34 And looking at those who were sitting around Him in a circle, He said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! 35 For whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.”

The picture Mark paints for us in this concluding section is poignantly symbolic.  The members of Jesus’ natural family, who have now re-entered the scene, stand outside the inner circle of which He forms the Center.  Seen in its historical context, this is sufficiently shocking in and of itself.  It’s another statement – an appallingly radical statement – about arkys, allegiances, and connections.  But Jesus’ blunt comment on this striking tableau makes the claim even more explicit:  “Here are my mother and my brothers!  For whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.”

In recent years there’s been a lot of talk among those who are accustomed to view reality through the lens of the “culture wars” about the dangers of “redefining the family.”  Ironically (there’s that word again), this is exactly what Jesus is doing here.  Just as the Kingdom of God is distinct from the kingdom of politics, so the Family of God is something completely different from the natural nuclear family.  It takes its name and derives its meaning from an entirely different Source.   

As we have already seen in Mark’s account of the calling of Simon, Andrew, James, and John, the family, like the nation, the state, the church, the “organization”, the “team”, or any other purely cosmic and sublunary construction, easily becomes “an arky out to govern us”[ii].  That’s precisely what’s happening to Jesus in this little vignette.  And He rebuffs the assault with deftness and grace.  “In the final analysis,” He says with a smile, “the only connection between people that has any lasting significance at all is the connection they share through their bond of allegiance to Me.”  Can you imagine how Mary and the boys must have felt?  It’s enough to rile anybody! 

Final Thoughts 

This is probably a good place to remind ourselves of Martin Luther’s maxim:  “The Christian is a most free lord of all and subject to none; the Christian is the most dutiful servant of all and subject to everyone.”[iii]  Jesus’ “redefinition of the family” does not entail the rejection of family ties or the nullification of natural affection.[iv]  It simply re-shifts the focus by directing our attention to the True Hub of the Wheel.  And it magnifies and enhances all our loves, whether of mother, father, brother, friend, neighbor, co-worker, or compatriot, by making them reflections of our love for Him who loved us and gave Himself up for us.            

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[i] N. T. Wright, Mark for Everyone, p. 38.

[ii] Vernard Eller, Christian Anarchy, p. 2.

[iii] Martin Luther, The Freedom of the Christian.

[iv] As many cultic groups would have it. 

Review

A sort of first significant milestone has been passed in Mark’s chronicle of the in-breaking of God’s Kingdom in Christ.  We’re still only in Chapter 3, yet Jesus’ public proclamation of the arrival of this Kingdom, coupled with His subtle and stubborn opposition to every other arche or exousia, whether supernatural or earthly, has already brought things to such a pass that the established authorities feel they have no choice except to get rid of Him.  Let’s see what happens next.        

Opposites:  Verses 7-12

7 But Jesus withdrew with His disciples to the sea.  And a great multitude from Galilee followed Him, and from Judea 8 and Jerusalem and Idumea and beyond the Jordan; and those from Tyre and Sidon, a great multitude, when they heard how many things He was doing, came to Him.  9 So He told His disciples that a small boat should be kept ready for Him because of the multitude, lest they should crush Him.  10 For He healed many, so that as many as had afflictions pressed about Him to touch Him.  11 And the unclean spirits, whenever they saw Him, fell down before Him and cried out, saying, “You are the Son of God.”  12 But He sternly warned them that they should not make Him known.[i]  

Webster’s Dictionary defines “irony” as “a method of humorous or sarcastic expression in which the intended meaning of the words used is the direct opposite of their usual sense.”  Experientially, “irony” can be understood as “a combination of circumstances or a result that is the opposite of what might be expected or considered appropriate.”  As we’ve said before, the Scriptures in general and Mark’s Gospel in particular are full of irony.  Solemn and pious readers may not see it, but the Bible is rife with dark humor.  It tells us again and again that life plays us lots of ironic jokes.  Jesus’ life was like that too.

A good way to create a compelling story, we’re told, is to write a scene and then ask yourself, What is the opposite of that?  Something of the sort is happening here.  In response to Jesus’ public activities in town and synagogue, the scribes and Pharisees have laid a plot to kill Him.  What is the opposite of that?  Easy:  Jesus takes His disciples and withdraws to the seaside.  But what happens then?  Instead of solitude, Jesus finds a crowd!  All at once He has become an international celebrity!  He is besieged by multitudes not only from Galilee and Judea but from such outlying areas as Idumea (Old Testament Edom) and pagan kingdoms like Tyre and Sidon. 

This is good news for the advancement of the Kingdom, right?  Ironically, no.  Why?  Because these crowds, who are pressing upon Him so forcefully that He has to get into a boat and put out from shore in order to escape being trampled, aren’t really interested in the Kingdom.  Allegiance to Jesus is the farthest thing from their minds.  All they want is to be healed from their maladies and afflictions.  And while Jesus is openly proclaimed to be “the Son of God,” as we might have hoped and expected, this confession does not come from the lips of His admirers and devotees, but from unclean spirits.  Jesus, seeing that these accolades and endorsements are coming from precisely the wrong quarter, tells the demons to cease and desist.  He forbids them to “make Him known” (Greek phaneron, “manifest”) to the crowd, reintroducing the theme of the “Incognito Messiah”.  It’s a bit late for that, of course.  Just another funny little twist in the narrative.                               

Another Kind of Revolution

13 And He went up on the mountain and called to Him those He Himself wanted.  And they came to Him.  14 Then He appointed twelve, that they might be with Him and that He might send them out to preach, 15 and to have power to heal sicknesses and to cast out demons:  16 Simon, to whom He gave the name Peter; 17 James the son of Zebedee and John the brother of James, to whom He gave the name Boanerges, that is, “Sons of Thunder”; 18 Andrew, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Thomas, James the son of Alphaeus, Thaddaeus, Simon the Canaanite; 19 and Judas Iscariot, who also betrayed Him.     

The next thing Jesus does is equally paradoxical.  Once again He withdraws, this time from the seaside to the mountainside.  And in so doing He makes a statement that is almost certain to be seriously – and ironically – misinterpreted.

“He went up on the mountain and called to Him those He Himself wanted.”  It’s easy for modern readers to miss the point here.  Jesus climbs the hill, Mark says, in order to choose twelve “apostles” who are to “be with Him” and whom He will “send out to preach” in His name.  But there’s more to this than meets the eye.  Jesus could not have been blind to the construction His contemporaries would have put upon His actions; for “up the mountain,” as N. T. Wright tells us, “is where people went to plot revolution.”  Nor is that all.  Twelve was a powerfully symbolic number for the Jews.  The choice of twelve apostles would have been seen as a clear reference to the twelve tribes of Israel, which in turn would have implied an agenda aimed at the Restoration of the Nation.  “Anyone launching a restoration movement,” Wright goes on to explain, “was doing so in the face of the current rulers and the current pressure groups.”  No wonder he concludes that this calling of the Twelve was “among Jesus’ most revolutionary gestures.”[ii]

But was it “revolutionary” in the usual sense?  “Revolutionary” as that term would have been understood in Jesus’ day, or in own, whether by Jews, Romans, liberals, conservatives, or “activists” of any variety?  To put it another way, was it politically revolutionary?  The answer, of course, is no.  And in this is one of the chiefest of the many ironies of Jesus’ ironic life. 

At risk of stating the obvious and repeating myself for the hundredth time, I will simply point out once again that the kingdom Jesus brings is not political.  The Authority He represents stands apart from and in direct contrast to that of any and every other kind of “arky”, including the “arkys” of government and nationality (John 18:36). 

We should add that this is a concept most modern people find it very hard to grasp.  We live in a time, says Jacques Ellul, when “politics and its offspring (nationalism, for example) have become the cornerstone of what is good or represents progress”[iii]; a time when our very humanity and personhood are judged according to our political commitments and involvements. 

“In our society,” Ellul continues, “anyone who keeps himself in reserve, fails to participate in elections, regards political debates and constitutional changes as superficial and without impact on the true problems of man … will be judged very severely by everybody.  He is the true heretic of our day.  And society excommunicates him as the medieval church excommunicated the sorcerer.”[iv]

This is what Ellul describes as “the Political Illusion”:  the idea that politics and political concerns are the be-all and end-all of existence.  It’s an illusion of the worst kind, for it makes many fantastic promises on which it can never deliver.  It destroys our basic humanity by diverting attention from the things that matter most.  For the church, it’s a particularly dangerous illusion when it is allowed to redefine the Kingdom in terms of worldly agendas and allegiances.  The Revolution and Restoration that Jesus set in motion have nothing to do with this deceptive mirage; and in the end, it was a fatal misunderstanding based on “the Political Illusion” that led to His death on the cross.                           

Final Thoughts 

Here is the greatest irony of all:  a Revolution which is not the “revolution” most of us are looking for; a Restoration that may entail changes the exact  opposite of what we expect.  For just as Aslan of Narnia is not a “tame lion,” so the Master who demands our total allegiance cannot be held accountable to human perceptions and plans.  He is the Lord, not only of the Sabbath but of all things; and every knee will ultimately bow to His will.        

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[i] This week’s Scripture quotations are taken from The New King James Version. 

[ii] Wright, Mark for Everyone, p. 34.

[iii] Jacques Ellul, The Political Illusion, p. 17.

[iv] Ibid., p. 18.

Review

For several weeks now – both in the course of our study of the Gospel of Mark and (last week) in a quick side-glance at the Letter to the Hebrews – we’ve been hovering over the theme of the Sabbath.  We’ve talked about the true significance of “Sabbath Rest;” about Jesus’ apparent determination to flout the traditional religious understanding of the Sabbath at almost every turn; and about the deeper meaning of His claim to be “Lord of the Sabbath.”  This subject continues to dominate Mark’s narrative in this week’s passage, but with a rather obvious raising of the stakes.

Upping the Ante

1 Now He entered the synagogue again, and a man was there who had a paralyzed hand.  2 In order to accuse Him, they were watching Him closely to see whether He would heal him on the Sabbath.[i]  

The scene now moves from the grain fields to the interior of the synagogue.  Once more Jesus finds Himself caught up in a confrontation with the religious authorities, but the tone is different this time.  No longer are the scribes and Pharisees merely curious about the teachings and behavior of the odd new rabbi from Nazareth.  Their mission has shifted from investigation and discovery to one of search and destroy.  They now have a clear agenda:  to “pin something” on Jesus – anything will do – so that they can “accuse” Him.  Based on past experience, they have every reason to suppose that He is about to oblige them by healing on the Sabbath once again.  And so they lie in wait, ready to pounce at a moment’s notice.    

The lesson here is simple.  The conflict between the “Arkys” is a battle to the death.  Whether we are talking about the Arky of Society, of Human Tradition, of the Religious Establishment, of Nationalism, of the Organization, the System, or the Power of the State, it is clear that the worldly or cosmic authorities cannot tolerate the threat posed by the Authority of Jesus.  That’s because allegiance, as we’ve said before, can never be a half-way thing.  It’s always a question of total, complete, and absolute loyalty.  There is no room in this world – or in the life of the individual – for a “double allegiance” of any kind (for example, “God and Country”).  No man can serve two masters.  Therefore it is essential that that the exousiai and kosmokratores (“world-rulers”) of this age (Ephesians 6:12) find some way to eliminate the Competition.  Such will be their goal from here on out.                       

Taking Up the Gauntlet

3 He told the man with the paralyzed hand, “Stand before us.”

The main thing we want to notice about Jesus’ response is that He accepts the challenge without flinching.  Not for an instant does He hesitate: immediately he says to the man with the paralyzed hand, “Get up.  Let’s do this now.”  He doesn’t try to “walk anything back,” nor does He seek to accommodate the sensibilities of His adversaries.  He drives straight on, and His driving is like the driving of Jehu. 

This in itself is worth comment.  As you will recall, there are several instances recorded in the book of Acts where the apostle Paul, who tells us elsewhere of his desire to “become all things to all men” (1 Corinthians 9:22), seems to go out of His way to avoid giving offense to pious Jews.  Jesus doesn’t take that tack. 

On another occasion very much like the one here in view, a synagogue leader objected to Jesus’ unorthodox activities by saying to the people, “There are six other days in the week when you can come and be healed of your diseases.  Why not come back then?” (Luke 13:14)  The man had a point. 

But Jesus cares nothing for this kind of reasoning.  After all, the issue of Ultimate Authority is at stake here.  Not only has the observance of the Sabbath been institutionalized, it’s also been weaponized, and the weapon has been turned against the Lord of the Sabbath Himself.  The conflict between the Arkys is and must be a battle to the death.  And so He takes His stand.                 

Good or Evil?

4 Then He said to them, “Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do evil, to save life or to kill?” But they were silent.    

At this point Jesus, in characteristic style, turns the whole scene upside-down by putting the question on an entirely different footing.  The Pharisees are in a huff about “doing” on the Sabbath.  According to them, no one can “do” anything on the Sabbath, because that’s the same as “working” on the Sabbath, which, as we all know, is against the rules.  But Jesus shifts the focus.  It’s not a problem of “doing” on the Sabbath, He says, but of “doing good or evil” on the Sabbath. 

What does He mean?  Simply this.  Genuine Sabbath Rest is not a question of “doing nothing.”  Real Sabbath Rest is about leaning into Jesus and finding repose in Him no matter what the circumstance.  When we “enter into God’s rest” in Christ, a la Hebrews 4, we do not suddenly cease to live.  Quite the opposite.  This is important to bear in mind, because to live is to choose and act, no matter who you are, where you are, or what day of the week it happens to be. 

Here’s the point.  Whether it’s Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday, “doing nothing” is never an option.  As Jesus expressed it on yet another occasion when He was in trouble for healing on the Sabbath, “My Father is working until now, and I Myself am working” (John 5:17).  Even on the Sabbath one must do something.  The question is whether we will choose to do good or evil.  As far as Jesus was concerned, it would have been evil to withhold healing from the paralyzed man when it lay within His power to grant it.  This is a spiritual principle well worth remembering at a time when society is trying to make up its mind whether to do something about state-sponsored oppression and injustice or not.                        

A Time for Anger

5 After looking around at them with anger and sorrow at the hardness of their hearts, He told the man, “Stretch out your hand.”  So he stretched it out, and his hand was restored.      

Are good Christians allowed to get angry?  Is it ever appropriate for a disciple of the Master to seethe and boil and rage against the Arkys and exousiai of this world?  Is it okay to get downright mad and frustrated with the system?  To overturn tables, make whips out of cords, and get right up in the faces of those who block up the hallways of the world and step on the necks of the weak and defenseless?  This verse seems to say yes. 

But notice how Jesus expresses His anger.  He doesn’t shout and scream.  He doesn’t break windows or start a fire.  Instead, in the spirit of the Lord’s Servant, who “does not quarrel or cry out, nor does anyone hear His voice in the street” (Matthew 12:19; Isaiah 42:2), He deals directly with the sufferer. He looks straight at the man and says, “Stretch out your hand” – a command the paralytic couldn’t have obeyed a moment before.  With calm determination He exercises the Authority which is resident within Him by virtue of Who He Is.  And at His word, the situation is reversed and the healing is accomplished.                

Strange Bedfellows

6 Immediately the Pharisees went out and started plotting with the Herodians against Him, how they might destroy Him.      

With that, the die is cast and Jesus’ doom is sealed.  His foes now have what they came for:  a reason to shut Him down and hound Him to the death.  It’s time to move on to Phase Two.  And so the Pharisees, pious and principled Jews whose loyalties are supposedly due to Yahweh alone, link arms with the Herodians, Roman collaborators par-excellence, and begin to make a plan. 

This is Politics – the Art of the Deal, the Way to Get Things Done – at its best.  It’s the coming together of otherwise incompatible worldly arkys in an unholy alliance with a single objective in view:  to oppose the advance of the Arky of God.  It’s what happens when so-called religious people decide the time has come to promote their own agenda and protect their own interests at any cost.  And it’s never a pretty picture.            

Final Thoughts 

Whether most readers realize it or not, these six verses are rife with irony.  They force us to ask ourselves a number of poignant questions.  Do we appreciate the way in which God’s kingdom has “burst into” the world in Jesus?  Or are we, like the Pharisees, too blinded by commitment to the “rules” to perceive what’s actually happening?  How do we, in our modern context, recover the real meaning of the Sabbath?  And do we understand that, whether waking or sleeping, sitting or walking, working or resting, speaking or keeping silence, we are always faced with an inevitable choice:  to do good or to do evil?

Perhaps most ironic of all is the rather obvious question:  did Jesus’ actions on this occasion actually amount to an infringement of the Sabbath?  “That,” suggests N. T. Wright, “is far from clear.  But His approach and attitude were clearly on a collision course with those of the self-appointed Guardians of the Ancestral Traditions.”[ii]   

Thus it was, is now, and shall be evermore. 

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[i] This week’s Scripture quotations are taken from The Holman Christian Standard Bible. 

[ii] N. T. Wright, Mark for Everyone, p. 31.

Preliminaries

In reading through Mark’s Gospel over the past few weeks, we’ve been looking at some of the different ways in which Jesus establishes His Kingdom, asserts His Authority, and calls His followers to give Him their absolute and uncontested Allegiance:  He heals diseases, casts out spiritual “principalities and powers,” challenges worldly “Arkys,” forgives sins “on earth,” and, most recently, proclaims Himself “Lord of the Sabbath.”  We’ve noted that in many of these instances, Christ seems deliberately (in the phrase of N.T. Wright) to “drive a coach and horses” through the revered and beloved institution of the Jewish Sabbath.  We’ve considered some of His reasons for doing so.

This week we’ll make a quick return visit to the book of Hebrews to see what it has to say on this subject.

Review

Last time we were in Hebrews the writer had just finished telling us that the New Covenant inaugurated by Jesus is superior to the Old Covenant inasmuch as Christ Himself is superior to both Moses and the angels.  He is, in fact, incomparably qualified to serve as High Priest (2:7) and Mediator between God and Man because He is both God and Man.  At that point the author launched into the second of five practical “warnings” or “exhortations” scattered throughout the book:  this one a warning about the danger of failing to enter God’s Rest through hard-heartedness and unbelief (3:7-19).

That warning is still in progress as we step back into Chapter 4.

Mixed with Faith

4:1 Therefore since a promise remains of entering His rest, let us fear lest any of you seem to have come short of it. 2 For indeed the gospel was preached to us as well as to them; but the word which they heard did not profit them, not being mixed with faith in those who heard it.  3 For we who have believed do enter that rest, as He has said:  “So I swore in My wrath, they shall not enter My rest,” although the works were finished from the foundation of the world.[i]

Three key words or phrases jump to the forefront in these verses:  promise, gospel, and “mixed with.”

Promise (Greek epangelia) is one of the most powerful grace words found in the New Testament.  It denotes something that is announced to someone.  There’s nothing you can do to earn or merit a promise:  you’re simply told that it’s coming your way, and it does. 

Gospel, as everybody knows, is another “announcement” word:  it’s a proclamation of good news.  Verse 2 uses the verb form of this word:  “We were evangelized (euangelismenoi) just as those people were.”  We today are like the ancient Children of Israel in that we also have received an announcement that something good is coming our way. 

“Mixed with” is the New King James Version’s rendering of the Greek synkerannymi.  It’s a good translation.  The word means “to mingle, blend with, connect, put together.”  The thought here is that faith – and remember that this faith (Greek pistis) is not just intellectual “belief”, but an act of the will and a commitment of the total self (i.e., allegiance) – is the catalyst that activates the effects of the announced promise in the life of the individual.  Without that connection, the “good news” is nothing but a dead letter.               

Rest

4 For He has spoken in a certain place of the seventh day in this way:  “And God rested on the seventh day from all His works”; 5 and again in this place:  “They shall not enter My rest.” 6 Since therefore it remains that some must enter it, and those to whom it was first preached did not enter because of disobedience, 7 again He designates a certain day, saying in David, “Today,” after such a long time, as it has been said, “Today, if you will hear His voice, do not harden your hearts.” 8 For if Joshua had given them rest, then He would not afterward have spoken of another day.      

The important word in this section is, of course, rest.  It’s at this point that we are strongly reminded of Jesus’ conflict with the Jewish religious authorities over the observance of the Sabbath as recorded in the Gospel of Mark.  The word “rest” or “Sabbath rest” occurs no fewer than eight times in Hebrews 4:1-13.  In only one instance does the writer use the Hebraic term “Sabbath” (Sabbatismos, verse 9).  In every other case the word used is the Greek katapausis, which means “ceasing, cessation, calmness.”

There’s a significant message in all of this.  Verses 4 through 8 are all about the deeper meaning of “Sabbath rest.”  What the writer has in mind is not a weekly religious observance, but an experience of genuine fellowship with the true and living God – as the Lord Himself calls it, “My Rest.”  It’s the repose we find when we entrust ourselves to Him alone; a sharing in the rest into which He Himself entered at the end of His creative work.  It’s firsthand knowledge of the Reality behind all realities, which can only be accessed through faith, belief, and trust, by ceasing from self-dependence and leaning into Him – not just on the seventh day of the week, but Today and every day.  (Psalm 95:7, 8)                         

Claim Ticket

9 There remains therefore a rest for the people of God. 10 For he who has entered His rest has himself also ceased from his works as God did from His. 11 Let us therefore be diligent to enter that rest, lest anyone fall according to the same example of disobedience.

These three verses represent the focal point of this passage.  When the author says, “There remains therefore a rest for the people of God,” what he means is that the reality of the promise has yet to be claimed.  Despite their unrelenting emphasis upon Sabbath observance, the people of the Old Covenant never really cashed in on this promise.  They failed to go there.  They never actually possessed true Sabbath rest because they never really “got” what it was all about.  Accordingly, the substance behind this religious shadow-image has yet to be realized.  But we can enter into it now, “Today,” by putting all our confidence in the One who came to make it real in the presence of His Person.        

The Power of the Word

12 For the word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. 13 And there is no creature hidden from His sight, but all things are naked and open to the eyes of Him to whom we must give account.

These are some of the most famous and best-beloved sentences in the entire New Testament; but it may be worth our while to ask ourselves precisely what they mean in this particular context.  The “Word of God” in this case is not simply “the Bible,” as we often assume.  Instead, it’s the promise of the gospel discussed above (verses 1 and 2).  It’s the Good News proclaimed by Jesus in Mark 1:15:  the announcement that the Kingdom is at hand, and that it can be accessed right now.  That’s why the writer describes this Word as living, powerful, active, vibrant, effervescent, uncontainable, and sharper than any two-edged sword.  It’s not a matter of dutiful religious piety, but of personal connection with (“mixed,” synkerannymi) and total allegiance to the King.         

Final Thoughts

Who is this King?  That question brings us back once again to our study of Mark.  This King, as we discovered in our last installment, is the uncontested Lord of the Sabbath.  In other words, the deeper significance of God’s Sabbath Rest is summed up in Him.  He is the unrivaled Master who, like His forefather David, comes to us in the “In-Between Time” with the message that everything we thought we knew about “religion” and “spirituality” is both wrong and right:  wrong because it cannot save us in and of itself; and right because it ultimately points to Him.         

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[i] This week’s Scripture references are taken from The New King James Version. 

Review

In our last passage (Mark 2:18-22) Jesus shocked the vigilant scribes and Pharisees by fraternizing with “unclean” publicans and sinners.  In so doing He made it clear that the Kingdom He comes to inaugurate has nothing to do with “performance” or “being good enough.”  The key to this Kingdom is absolute attachment to His Person. 

In this week’s section He takes His bold assertions to another level. 

Pushing the Envelope

23 And it came about that He was passing through the grainfields on the Sabbath, and His disciples began to make their way along while picking the heads of grain.[i]  

In and of itself, there is nothing illicit about the behavior of Jesus’ disciples, though it is about to spark another controversy.  Deuteronomy 23:25 explicitly states, “When you enter your neighbor’s standing grain, then you may pluck the heads with your hand, but you shall not wield a sickle in your neighbor’s standing grain.”  This, like the regulations governing gleaning (Leviticus 19:9, 10), was part of the Mosaic Law’s provision for the needs of the poor and the hungry.  It was a nod in the direction of humanity as over against the claims of personal property and heartless legalism. 

The problem, then, was not that the disciples were plucking grain.  The problem was that they were doing it on the Sabbath.  For according to the rabbis, picking grain was the same thing as “harvesting”.  And harvesting was work.       

We’ve seen Jesus violate the Sabbath before (Mark 1:21ff.).  We will certainly see Him do so again.  But there’s a difference here.  In almost every other instance recorded in the Gospels, Jesus oversteps the accepted bounds of Sabbath observance in order to meet some pressing human need.  He casts out demons, cures debilitating ailments, and liberates people from lifelong bondage.  Nothing of the sort is at stake in this scene.  The disciples don’t have to pluck grain on the Sabbath; they’re aren’t starving to death.  In the words of one commentator, they are simply “having a snack.”[ii]  There’s something almost glib, playful, and irresponsible about their Sabbath-breaking on this particular occasion.   

Why then does Jesus tolerate it?  Why does He permit them to act like this when He knows the self-appointed Guardians of Traditional Religiosity and Public Morality are watching?  In the case of the leper He went out of His way to avoid giving offense to the religious authorities (Mark 1:44).  Why now does He so brazenly push the envelope?

This question lies at the heart of Mark’s message.  We’ll attempt to answer it in what follows.             

“Not Allowed”

24 And the Pharisees were saying to Him, “See here, why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?”   

Since authority has been one of our key themes over the past few weeks, it’s worth noting that the Pharisees possessed no official jurisdiction over the lives of the common people.  No one had appointed them to act as the “Spiritual Police.”  They simply volunteered for the position.  Throughout the Gospel accounts the Pharisees appear in the role of Christ’s most dogged antagonists, but they weren’t all bad.  Most of them were zealous, well-meaning Jews who just wanted to make sure that God’s standards of righteousness were consistently upheld in both private life and the public square (sound familiar?).

Unfortunately, their zeal encouraged the development of a mindset all too common among upstanding religious people in all times and places.  This attitude is neatly summed up in the language they use:  “Why are they doing what is not allowed (Greek ho ouk exestin)?”  The Pharisees’ whole outlook was wrapped up in an almost neurotic obsession with correctness.  Their concern with propriety had completely overtaken that part of the brain which might have responded favorably to Jesus’ offer of Life – the effervescent Life that explodes wineskins.  Their entire world was hemmed in by anxieties about what is and what is not “permitted”.  And they didn’t even recognize their desperate need for redemption and release.                        

Royal Precedent

25 And He said to them, “Have you never read what David did when he was in need and became hungry, he and his companions; 26 how he entered into the house of God in the time of Abiathar the high priest and ate the consecrated bread, which is not lawful for anyone to eat except the priests, and he gave it also to those who were with him?”    

But Jesus doesn’t take this opportunity to comment on the repressive spirituality of the Pharisees.  That’s a subject for another time.  Instead, He responds by drawing attention to Himself.  And He does so by citing a scriptural precedent. 

“Don’t you remember what David did,” He asks, “when he and his men went into the tabernacle and ate the sacred showbread to satisfy their hunger?”  (See 1 Samuel 21:1-6.)

What’s noteworthy about this retort is that the details of the comparison don’t exactly line up.  David and his men – outlaws in hiding and on the run – were in desperate need of food and water at the time of the incident in question.  As we’ve already pointed out, this was not the case with Jesus and His disciples.  So what does the analogy mean?

The answer is that Jesus is using this situation to make another point about the nature of the Kingdom and His own Identity as King.  According to N.T. Wright, He’s equating Himself with David in David’s “Already-But-Not-Yet” period.[iii] 

At this moment in his career, David was “in between” things:  long since anointed as king by Samuel, he was nevertheless still on the lam from the persecution of Saul.  He was like Aragorn in his Strider phase; Richard I in Sherwood Forest; or young Wart in the time immediately following his surprisingly successful attempt at pulling the sword from the stone.

Jesus’ position is precisely parallel.  He is the True King, but few acknowledge Him as such.  He’s the Incognito Messiah – a theme we’ve encountered before in our study of Mark.  And as the unrecognized King and Messiah, He has the authority to by-pass the Sabbath regulations.  That’s the point of this little story. 

Wright concludes:  “This kind of Sabbath-breaking, so far from being an act of casual and wanton civil disobedience, is a deliberate sign, like the refusal to fast:  a sign that the King is here, that the kingdom is breaking in, that instead of waiting for the old creation to come to its point of rest, the new creation is already bursting upon the old world.”[iv]                   

The Sabbath and Its Lord

27 And He was saying to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.  27 Consequently, the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.”      

Jesus states His own conclusion in the form of a sort of two-part syllogism.  First, He makes a definitive statement about the purpose and meaning of the Sabbath:  it exists to meet human need.  The Sabbath is supposed to serve man, not the other way around.  In other words, it’s an image of salvation.  Secondly, He asserts that He is the “Lord of the Sabbath,” inasmuch as He is also “the Son of Man.”

In these few words Jesus claims to be King both as God and as Man (remember Hebrews 1 and 2).  For while the Sabbath was made for Man, and is thus subordinated to the Son of Man, there is another sense in which only Yahweh – the Creator of the universe who rested from His labors on the Seventh Day – can rightfully be regarded as its author and Lord.              

Final Thoughts:  The Presence of the Kingdom

A “deliberate sign” indicating the Presence of the Kingdom in the Person of the King.  The fulfillment of the real Purpose and Meaning of Sabbath Rest, manifested in exclusive allegiance to His Power and Authority.  That’s what these six verses are all about.  And in their own way, they remind us once again that, like the King Himself and His forefather David, we, the subjects of this Kingdom, are living out our days in an “in between” time.  We, like our Master, are called to carry out our mission in the context of the “Already-But-Not-Yet”:  between longing and fulfillment, sorrow and joy, turmoil and peace.         

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[i] This week’s Scripture quotations are taken from The New American Standard Bible. 

[ii] Eckhard Schabel, The Tyndale Commentary on Mark, p. 77.

[iii] N.T. Wright, Mark for Everyone, p. 27.

[iv] Ibid.

Review

Let’s not forget that we undertook this study of Mark with the intention of glancing back at the Letter to the Hebrews from time to time to see how its theology might illumine our reading of the Gospel.  Last week’s discussion provides a good example:  Hebrews takes an in-depth look at the religion of the old Levitical law and demonstrates how it has been completely fulfilled and swallowed up in the actual presence of God in Jesus Christ.  Mark 2:13-17 does something quite similar:  it gives us a picture of Levi, the disgraced and disillusioned heir and namesake of the Levitical priests, abandoning everything to follow the Incarnate God-Man. 

In this week’s passage Mark continues along the same trajectory, giving us some further insight into the differences between the Old and the New.     

Emptiness

18 Now John’s disciples and the Pharisees were fasting.  So they came to Jesus and said, “Why do the disciples of John and the disciples of the Pharisees fast, but your disciples don’t fast?”[i]  

Notice that this question comes to Jesus from two widely disparate groups:  John’s disciples and the Pharisees.  John is a wild, unconventional prophet.  The Pharisees are the staid, stodgy, established custodians of the religious status quo.  Yet the two groups have something in common:  both practice the spiritual discipline of fasting.  And both wonder why Jesus and His disciples don’t follow their example.  What’s the controversy all about?

We can’t answer this without first settling a preliminary question:  what is fasting?  Why does anybody do it?

Fasting in the Old Testament has a predominantly negative significance.  For example, the Day of Atonement was a day of fasting:  a time to mourn over and make up for past sins (Leviticus 16:29, 31).  Other fast days (see, for example, Esther 9:31; Zechariah 8:19) had a similar focus and purpose.  Fasting is about sorrow and regret and repentance – themes that have an obvious connection with the preaching of John. 

At a deeper level, fasting is a way of expressing unfulfilled longings.  The person who fasts embraces physical emptiness as a way of acknowledging spiritual emptiness.  He confesses that something is lacking and engages in an intense effort to seek and find it.  He aches and groans within himself, reaching for that One Necessary Thing which alone can fill up the yawning abyss within.  He wants something that he desperately needs without necessarily knowing what it is.  The Pharisees fasted twice a week, possibly as a way of hastening the coming of the Messiah and the Last Days. 

Fasting, then, is about emptiness and yearning.

Consummation

19 Jesus 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 do not fast. 

Weddings have nothing to do with emptiness and yearning.  The wedding feast is a celebration of present joy.  Once the wedding day arrives, the period of longing and yearning has come to an end.  The point of satisfaction has been gained.  This is the time of fulfillment.  This is the moment of consummation. 

Jesus uses this imagery to clarify the significance of His presence among us.  He taps into ancient Hebrew ideas about the “marriage” between Yahweh and His people and the coming of the Messiah as the long-awaited bridegroom.  In so doing, He underscores the uniqueness of His Person.  Jesus is God, and in Him God is with us.  Nothing like this has ever happened before.  It’s new, uncontainable, and real. 

Here’s the point:  as long as Jesus the Bridegroom is present in our midst, it’s party time.  This is not an occasion for fasting.  There is no room here whatsoever for unfulfilled longings – for wishing and hoping and groping after something better, something more.  “The kingdom of God is at hand.”
                       

In-Between

20 But the days are coming when the bridegroom will be taken from them, and at that time they will fast.  

But that’s not the end of the story.  For a time is coming, Jesus says, when the party will come to a screeching halt.  The bridegroom will be violently snatched out of the revelers’ midst and they will suddenly find themselves in a very different situation.  When that happens, they will fast indeed.  On that day there will be a marked shift in the tone of their day-to-day experience.  This is the time in which we are now living.

“At that time they will fast.”  How are we to understand this?  Is Jesus here laying a “religious rule” on His disciples?  Instead of setting them free, is He linking arms with the Pharisees and saddling His followers with yet another burdensome obligation?  Is He telling us that, if we really want to be holy, we’re going to have to eat fish on Friday and give up chocolate for Lent?

I don’t think so.  I believe He’s speaking on a much deeper level.  He’s talking about the fundamental nature of the Christian life in the In-Between Time.  He’s drawing our attention to the emptiness and deficiency that sometimes characterize our lives in that uncomfortable place between the “Already and the Not Yet.”  The “fasting” He has in mind is the ambiguity of knowing both joy and unfulfilled longing within the context of a single experience.  This is the “Normal Christian Life” as Paul describes it in Romans 8:23; a life in which “we also, who have the first-fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we eagerly await our adoption, the redemption of our bodies.” 

Wineskins

21 No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment; otherwise, the patch pulls away from it, the new from the old, and the tear becomes worse.  22 And no one pours new wine into old wineskins; otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the skins will be destroyed.  Instead new wine is poured into new wineskins.

Much has been written and preached on these two images – the unshrunk patch of cloth and the wineskins.  They are two different ways of describing the relationship between the Old and the New.  I don’t want to belabor the subject here.  Suffice it to say that the Reality of the Kingdom (and this brings us back to the book of Hebrews) is too unpredictable, too effervescent, too vibrant to be held within the confines of the dry and ossified forms of traditional religiosity.  As we said at the beginning of this entry, the Old has been both fulfilled and swallowed up in the New – which is just another way of saying that the Old cannot contain the New.  It’s the difference between the chick and the egg, the butterfly and the chrysalis.  New wine requires new wineskins, says Jesus.  Why?  Because it is bursting with Life.    

Final Thoughts:  “To Every Thing …”

“To every thing there is a season,” says the writer of Ecclesiastes, “and a time to every purpose under heaven (Ecclesiastes 3:1).  Appropriateness is the central idea.  When Jesus is on the scene, all is triumph and victory and peace.  But when His face is hidden from us, it is entirely fitting to acknowledge our own emptiness and need.  The ordinary Christian life is like a wavering line that oscillates between these two poles.

So if you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands; but if not, don’t fret too much about it.  That’s the way things go in this unpredictable space between the Ages.  

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[i] This week’s Scripture quotations are taken from the NET Bible. 

Review

Over the past few weeks we’ve watched the Kingdom unfold as a conflict between Arkys:  the authority of Jesus versus every other form of authority.  We’ve said that true, original, primal authority – the exousia of God – is not a matter of “bossing people around” but of healing and liberation.  We’ve seen Jesus put this genuine authority to work by casting out the Rulers of darkness, curing a leper, and commanding a paralytic to rise up and walk.  In this passage He brings the same power to bear upon a very different group of invalids and slaves … and offers it to yet another.

Crossroads

13 And He went out again by the seashore; and all the multitude were coming to Him, and He was teaching them.[i]    

The scene shifts in verse 13 from the house in Capernaum (2:1) to the shores of Lake Galilee, where the first disciples were called (1:16-20).

In many ways the seashore was the perfect setting for Jesus and His message.  It was a kind of Crossroads:  a commercial hub where merchants dropped their cargoes, loaded them on beasts of burden, and set out for points north and south.  It was an agora, like the Areopagus in Athens – a busy marketplace of conflicting personalities and contrasting ideas, where the Kingdom of God might thrust itself in amongst the kingdoms of this world in a powerful, striking way. 

It was also just the right spot to set up a customs office. 

Shift of Allegiance

14 And as He passed by, He saw Levi the son of Alphaeus sitting in the tax office, and He said to Him, “Follow Me!”  And he rose and followed Him.

Levi operated such an office.  No doubt the people who worked around the seashore had all kinds of problems with one another, but everyone had a problem with Levi.  He was the kind of guy who shafted his own people for personal gain:  a Roman toady, a sell-out to the occupying Oppressor, “the very embodiment of anti-nationalism.”[ii]  The Rabbis said that repentance was especially difficult, if not impossible, for tax-gatherers, because they regularly milked their neighbors for more than they had coming to them. 

Levi, as it turns out, was a fairly common name among first-century Jews.  Most of the men who bore it were of Levitical descent, suggesting that they may have been priests, religious functionaries, or synagogue leaders. This Levi was anything but.  His name contradicted his life. 

To be fair, it’s possible that Levi didn’t choose this path for himself.  He may have been just another victim of the system trying to make a living any way he could.  He may have despised himself just as much as everyone else did.  That might explain why he later changed his name to Matthew (Matthew 9:9), a variant of Nathanael:  “Gift of God.”

The “Gift of God” dropped into his life when Jesus – whom Levi had probably seen many times by the lakeside – walked up and said, “Follow me.”  For whatever reason, he was prepared when the moment came.  Without a word he got up, abandoned his living, and went with the Master.  This may not be as odd as it seems.  As N.T. Wright observes, “It was perhaps the first time for ages that someone had treated him as a human being instead of a piece of dirt.”[iii]   

“We shouldn’t miss the deeper meaning of Jesus’ call to Levi,” Wright goes on to say.  “Levi had been working for the man who thought of himself as King of the Jews [Herod Antipas].  Now he was going to work for someone else with royal aspirations.”[iv]

In other words, Levi’s response to Jesus’ invitation, like that of Simon, Andrew, James, and John, signals a shift in allegiance.  It’s another victory in the battle of the Arkys. 

Dinner Party    

15 And it came about that He was reclining at table in his house, and many tax-gatherers and sinners were dining with Jesus and His disciples; for there were many of them, and they were following Him.

Now comes another change.  Suddenly we find ourselves at a dinner party in the house of Levi, along with Jesus, His disciples, and a big group of “tax-collectors and sinners:”  “for there were many of them, and they were following Him.”  

Why the crowd?  That’s easy.  These folks had observed Jesus’ behavior toward one of their number, and they wanted a piece of the action.  They, too, were longing to know what it felt like to be “treated as human beings instead of dirt.”  His kindness had won their hearts (Romans 2:4). 

There’s deep symbolism in this scene.  A dinner party, like a seaside market, is just the kind of place you’d expect to find Jesus and His crew.  A feast, a celebration with food and drink – this kind of fellowship is what His Kingdom is all about.  Of Moses and the elders of the people it had been said, “They beheld the God of Israel, and they ate and drank” (Exodus 24:11).  Something similar is happening here.                 

“Spiritual Distancing”

16 And when the scribes of the Pharisees saw that He was eating with the sinners and tax-gatherers, they began saying to His disciples, “Why is He eating with tax-gatherers and sinners?”

As in the time of Christ, so today there are people who don’t like this picture of the Kingdom.  They don’t want to rub elbows with “undesirables”.  The Pharisees were of that stamp.

The Pharisees practiced “Spiritual Distancing.”  Their very name derives from a Persian word meaning “separate”.  In the beginning it was a derogatory term; but like many other names of the sort – “Puritan”, for example, or “Yankee” – it was eventually adopted as a badge of honor by the group to whom it was applied. 

The Pharisees prized moral and spiritual purity.  “Touch no unclean thing” (Isaiah 52:11) was the foundation stone of their code.  That’s why they demanded that the disciples give an account of their Master’s actions:  “Why does He eat with tax-gatherers?” they wanted  to know.  “Why does He make Himself a ‘companion of sinners?’” (1 Enoch 97:4).

“Sinners” (hamartoloi) was a kind of technical term among religious professionals of the day.  It could refer to flagrant immoralists, like thieves and prostitutes and murderers.  But more frequently it was applied to the “common folk” (Hebrew ‘am ha’aretz) who failed to live up to the Pharisees’ rigorous standards of ritual purity:  moral “lepers” who might give you the spiritual “cooties” if you got too close to them.  From this point of view, a “sinner” was somebody who simply wasn’t “good enough.”                           

Sick or Well?

17 And hearing this, Jesus said to them, “It is not those are healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick; I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” 

Jesus hears what the religious professionals are saying and gives them a direct reply.  As was often the case in His interactions with such people, His answer is laced with irony and sarcasm.  “I’m a doctor,” He says coolly.  “I’m here to heal the infected.  If you’ve tested negative, you don’t need my services.  You can go about your business.”   

Incredibly, some very astute Bible scholars don’t seem to get the joke.  “Is He excluding scribes and Pharisees?” wonders commentator Eckhard Schnabel.  “That hardly seems plausible.”  Schnabel concludes that Jesus’ main concern is “not exclusion but priority.”[v]

But is that really what He’s trying to say here?  I don’t think so.  On the contrary, Christ’s “main concern” in this passage, as in the “Parable of The Pharisee and the Publican” (Luke 18:9-14), is to stick a thumb in the ribs of “those who trust in themselves that they are righteous and view others with contempt.”  His point is that everyone is infected (Romans 3:10).  Everyone needs the doctor.  Unfortunately, only those honest enough to admit their infirmity are likely to seek a  cure.           

Final Thoughts:  Called to Jesus

Interestingly enough, the deeper meaning of this passage is powerfully illuminated by what might otherwise appear an abstruse question of textual criticism.  In some of our Bibles – most notably the original King James Version – the concluding sentence reads, “I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” 

This rendering is founded upon the Textus Receptus, the edition of Greek texts established by Erasmus of Rotterdam in the 16th century and used as the basis for most Protestant translations up until the 19th century.  But older, more reliable manuscripts don’t include the words “to repentance.”  They simply read, “I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”  In a sense, this is the key to the whole story.

“Christ,” says Alfred Edersheim, “came not to call the righteous, but sinners – not ‘to repentance,’ as our common text erroneously puts it, but to Himself, to the Kingdom; and this is the beginning of repentance.”[vi]

Why is this so important?  Because Jesus, in contrast to the scribes and Pharisees and almost every religious system in the world, befriends sinners while they are still sinners (Romans 5:8).  He makes a special point of extending Himself to people who normally wouldn’t be considered “good enough” for Him.

As Edersheim explains, “All other systems know of no welcome to the sinner till, by some means … he ceases to be a sinner and becomes a penitent.  They would first make him a penitent and then bid him welcome to God; Christ first welcomes him to God and so makes him a penitent.”[vii]   

“Jesus!  What a friend for sinners!”  And what a model for those of us who aspire to represent Him in the world!  His first priority is not to call people to “clean up their act.”  Instead, He draws them to Himself.  And out of the context of that friendship He becomes their Savior.        

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[i] This week’s Scripture quotations are taken from the New American Standard Bible.   

[ii] Alfred Edersheim, The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, Vol. I, Book III, Ch. XVII, p. 515.

[iii] Wright, Mark for Everyone, p. 20.

[iv] Ibid., pp. 20-21.

[v] Eckhard Schabel, The Tyndale Commentary on Mark, p. 73.

[vi] Edersheim, Vol. I, Book III, Ch. XVII, p. 507.

[vii] Ibid.

In the course of last week’s study (Mark 2:1-12) I said that authority (verse 10) is a profoundly spiritual issue that might merit closer attention.  That’s what this entry is all about.

Authority Misrepresented

Authority is a critical biblical concept.  From a certain perspective it’s central to the message of Mark’s Gospel.  It’s also been seriously misunderstood and misrepresented in our Contemporary Conservative American Christian context.

By way of example:  about two years ago, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions attempted to justify the Trump administration’s policy of separating immigrant parents from their children at the Mexican border by appealing to Scripture: 

“I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained the government for his purposes,” Sessions said during a speech to law enforcement officers in Fort Wayne, Indiana.  “Orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves.  Consistent and fair application of the law is in itself a good and moral thing, and that protects the weak and protects the lawful.”[i]

This interpretation of Romans 13 – an interpretation which has been with us at least since the advent of Constantine’s “Christian Empire” back in the Fourth Century – seriously confuses the intent of Paul’s original teaching.  Let’s find out why. 

Authority and the Author

In English, authority is clearly associated with authorship.  The author or originator of a thing has (or should have) the last word where His own creation is concerned.

In Greek this connection is even clearer.  Exousia is a compound of the preposition ex, “out of, from,” and the noun ousia, “essence or being.”  This is why authority is a “profoundly spiritual issue.”  Exousia is rooted in and flows out of the essence of the Person who exercises it.  It’s a function of His being.  God has authority not because of the “position” He occupies but because of who He is.  Jesus wields authority “on earth” because He is God.    

Delegated Authority    

The Bible makes it clear that God, the central locus of all authority, has granted to some of His creatures the privilege of exercising divine exousia on His behalf:  “He makes His angels winds, and His ministers a flame of fire” (Hebrews 1:7; quoting Psalm 104).  Mankind, too, has a place in this scheme:  “Thou hast made him for a little while lower than the angels; Thou hast crowned him with glory and honor, and hast appointed him over the works of Thy hands; Thou has put all things under his feet” (Hebrews 2:7-8, quoting Psalm 8; see also Genesis 1:28). 

Authority delegated to men and angels.  This idea is fleshed out and developed in many places in Scripture, most notably in Daniel and Revelation, where figures such as “Gabriel” (Daniel 9:21), “the Prince of the kingdom of Persia” (Daniel 10:13), “the Prince of Greece” (Daniel 10:20), “the King of the South” (Daniel 11:5), and the “Horsemen of the Apocalypse” (Revelation 6:1-4) represent both the angelic powers that hold sway “in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12) and the human rulers who serve as their proxies “on earth.”  These rulers, both human and angelic, seem to control the course of human history.  But as we discovered in our study of Revelation, this is an illusion; for in the end, all power reverts back to the Lamb and the Rider on the White Horse (Revelation 6:2; 19:11-16).

Usurped Authority

From delegated authority it’s just a hop, skip, and a jump to usurped authority.  That’s what has happened in our world. 

The original Delegate-turned-Usurper, of course, is Satan himself.  He correctly claims to be able to dispense authority (exousia) over “all the kingdoms of the earth” (Luke 4:5-8) because he is the “Ruler of this World” (John 12:31).  Unfortunately, he has turned this delegated power to bad ends; and his minions, whether supernatural or mortal, are inextricably caught up in his agenda of usurpation and abuse.  To some degree or another, all are like him because all are beholden to him.[ii]  Accordingly, “There is a very strong strand of Gospel teaching which sees secular government as the province of the sovereignty of Satan.”[iii] 

That’s why the conflict Jesus faces when He comes on the scene is primarily a conflict of Arkys.  It’s a question of the authority of Jesus versus every other form of authority, whether “in heaven” or “on earth.” 

Ordered Authority

Jeff Sessions is just the latest in a long line of nominally Christian tyrants who have appealed to Romans 13 in an attempt to legitimize their questionable actions.  Too many of us have been cowed by this intimidating tactic.  Too many have accepted the idea that “the Christian thing to do” is to “respect” authority no matter what it does because “Romans 13 says so.”     

But this is not consistent with the example of Jesus.  Think about it.  In the passages we’ve been studying, does Christ automatically defer to the religious authorities of His day?  Is He careful to avoid giving them offense?  Does He bow before their hoary and hallowed opinions?  Obviously not.  Instead, He defies them.  He purposely violates their religious sensibilities.  He sets His authority in opposition to theirs.  Most importantly, He demonstrates the true application of authority.  It’s not a matter of “lording it over” people but of healing their deficiencies and setting them free. 

To Pilate Jesus says, “You would have no authority over Me unless it had been given you from above” (John 19:11).  He’s unimpressed with Pilate’s authority because He knows it is derivative.  When He asserts that it comes “from above,” He isn’t simply saying that it has roots in God, as if to legitimize it.  He’s also referring to the chain of delegation and usurpation through which it descends.  In other words, He’s saying that it is both derivative and corrupt.           

Paul makes the same claim in Romans 13.  Unlike Jeff Sessions, Paul does not tell us that God has “ordained” the powers that be.  The word he uses (tetagmenai) means “ordered.”  In agreement with Christ, he affirms that God allows these powers to operate while simultaneously keeping them restrained within appropriate boundaries.    

As John Howard Yoder puts it, “The Christian who accepts subjection to government retains moral independence and judgment.  The authority of government is not self-justifying.  Whatever government exists is ordered by God; but the text does not say that whatever the government does or asks of its citizens is good.”[iv]

Final Thoughts:  Authority and Allegiance

In the end, we come back to what we’ve been saying all along:  the kingdom of God is a matter of exclusive allegiance.  It’s centered in our confidence that all authority, whether in heaven or on earth, belongs to Jesus alone (Matthew 28:18).  It belongs to Him because it flows out of who He is.       

As for the archai and exousiai who rule over this present world, whether human or angelic, we owe them no allegiance whatsoever.  The submission, subjection, or cooperation we render them has nothing to do with reverence or devotion.  It’s basically another way of loving our enemies (Matthew 5:43; Romans 13:8).   

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[i] Julie Zauzmer and Keith McMillan, “Sessions Cites Bible Passage Used to Defend Slavery in Defense of Separating Immigrant Families,” The Washington Post, June 15, 2018.

[ii] I do not say that all of the angelic powers “in the heavenlies” participated in Satan’s primeval rebellion – only those who now share in his dominion over the earth.  In C. S. Lewis’s fictional scheme of things, this is what makes Earth “The Silent Planet:”  Earth alone, out of the entire cosmos, lies under the sway of the “Bent Oyarsa,” the Fallen Prince.  Thus, all authority (exousia) “on earth” is inevitably twisted and corrupt.  In a very important sense, it is all usurped authority.       

[iii] John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus, p. 194.

[iv] Ibid., p. 205.