Mark's Jesus

Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis
February 17, 2008, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill

Isaiah 52:7-9
Mark 1:1-11; 15:33-39

“And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved, and with you I am well pleased.’… Now when the centurion, who was facing him, saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, ‘Truly this man was God’s Son.’”

“The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” reads the first sentence of the gospel that established the genre. Who did Mark say that Jesus was? He said what words can never really contain: he said Jesus was the Son of God.

For much of the last century, many thought that by these words Mark meant to connect Jesus with the Hellenistic concept of a divine man, a concept popular in the culture of his day. The belief was that human beings “could be…endowed with divine powers and ultimately could themselves become gods.” In Greek such a person was known as theios aner: a divine man who was given powers such as “foreknowledge, persuasive speech, the ability to heal and perform miracles; in addition” notes biblical scholar Paul Achtemeier, these figures “were frequently set apart by an extraordinary birth and death.”

Having grown up hearing the stories of men become gods in this way, it is not a leap to understand why Mark would portray Jesus as a human being who received supernatural powers at his baptism, powers that endowed him with “divine wisdom and the divine [authority] to perform miracles.” Such a belief—that Jesus was adopted as God’s Son at baptism--finally was ruled out of theological order as well as out of the question when it came to understanding the meaning of Mark’s confession.

Rather Mark can only be understood if we take his confession to mean just the opposite. Mark tells us the story not of a human being become God but of God become human. He counters the identity of the divine man as superhero or as demigod with the gospel of him whose suffering and death, supremely of all things, revealed the suffering and death of God Himself. To wit, Jesus’ passion takes up almost half of this briefest of the gospels. And though he includes the reports of Jesus’ miracles, exorcisms, and healings, the stories he writes around them are very carefully told. First he has only the demons confess Jesus to be God’s Son in response to the miracles and exorcisms. It is as if to say, “Believing in Jesus because of miracles is demonic.” Second he deliberately pulls into the story the characters that populated his Hellenized world--people who are, for the most part, seeking men become gods—and portrays them, at best, as partially recognizing Jesus for who he is and, at worst, completely misunderstanding the man and the moment.

You and I read Mark’s gospel, of course, through the lens of a culture that is as enamored with super heroes as it is uncomfortable with unrepeatable wonders. We miss and misunderstand, according to Mark, the God with whom we have daily to do in the man who is God’s Son. So once again I ask you to imagine what we cannot imagine: imagine what is missed and what is magnified if Mark is the only gospel we have.

For instance, nothing of Jesus’ birth is mentioned…thereby depriving me of those late night debates with my mother about the virgin birth! (She was for it and I on the fence!) Clearly the biology/gynecology/genealogy of God’s Son did not concern Mark in the least. Nor do we read, at the end, one word of Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances. Rather we are told only of an empty tomb, an angel and a group of terrified women who say nothing to anyone. Apparently Mark’s confession of Jesus as God’s Son needed neither embellishment. In fact, if such beginnings and endings were standard in the stories of divine men becoming gods, he likely would have avoided mentioning an extraordinary nativity or an after-death appearance.

But if not a virgin birth or a resurrected body, then what led Mark--and what of Mark’s gospel might lead us--to say in the end, “Truly this man is God’s Son!”?

Mark begins, you must remember, with the ending. Something of God has been disclosed in Jesus’ suffering and death and in the mystery of an empty grave that has set Mark to say in the first sentence of his gospel what he now knows human beings may only understand beneath the cross. Jack Kingsbury, Professor of Biblical Theology, says the same: “It is only [through and] beyond the cross that any human—and therefore the reader—can understand what it means for Jesus to be” who Mark says he is: the Christ, the Son of God.

So Mark takes us there, masterfully unfolding the gospel of God’s Son amid mystery and misunderstanding. In fact, he deliberately keeps Jesus’ identity a secret from every character in his gospel save for us, telling the story forward just as Mark and Mark’s characters must have lived it.

Enter immediately the Baptist and his followers who in Matthew and Luke appear only after the stories of Jesus’ birth. Moreover Matthew and Luke muddy the waters of Jesus’ baptism with a lengthy give and take between John and the gathered crowd while Mark cuts to the chase: John prophesies, Jesus arrives, John baptizes. This, however, is all that is seen by those who were on the banks of the Jordon that day. Thanks to Mark, we see more.

First and again in contrast to Matthew and Luke who report that the heavens are opened (a verb that leaves open the possibility that the heavens will close up again), Mark tells his readers that the heavens are being torn apart! Why this verb except to insist that God has forever quit the distance between time and eternity, between heaven and earth, in order to redeem us from our sin, from our lives lived without God between birth and death.

Schizo is the verb. But even more astonishing than its first use is its second! Schizo turns out to be the same verb Mark uses when Jesus breathes his last and the curtain of the temple is torn in two. The curtain, you will remember from last year’s reading of the Old Testament, is the curtain that hides the Holy of Holies, the Ark of the Covenant that contains the tablets of the Law given to Moses at Sinai. A curtain apparently was as close as God’s people ever wanted to come to God’s real presence. Only the High Priest dared go behind it…once a year…on the Day of Atonement. Bearing a cup of the blood from animals sacrificed by the people to atone for their sins, the High Priest sprinkled the blood boldly in the dangerous presence of God, begging God’s pardon.

That is to say, the curtain functioned—and still functions in the temple today--not to keep people from God for reasons of religious hierarchy, but to protect them “from a dangerous encounter with God, an encounter which [would mean] certain death.” The same curtain, says Mark, at Jesus’ death was not partially ripped but torn in two, meaning in all of God’s terrible and tender freedom, God was at large in the world; meaning Jesus had acted as the High Priest, once for all, to give a cup of his own blood in death for the forgiveness of sins; meaning now nothing in life or in death—neither angels nor principalities nor things present nor things to come could ever again separate us from the God who has loved us in this way.

If tearing is the first detail, the second detail at Jesus’ baptism and his death is a declaration. Immediately on the heels of the tearing, Jesus is declared to be God’s Son. God first declares this at Jesus’ baptism and we alone are privy to the truth; in the middle of Mark’s gospel—at the Transfiguration—God’s Spirit declares the same; and then at the last and for the first time, Mark places his own confession in the mouth of a Roman centurion…a human witness…who stands at the foot of the cross. The centurion has heard and seen the complete derision in which Jesus was held by the crowds, the criminals, the chief priests and the scribes, so that there was nothing that should have led him to confess Jesus as God’s Son. Yet as he stood facing Jesus he watched him die as one forsaken not by the bystanders but by his God.

For Mark the death Jesus dies is an act done not in response or in relation to religion or to Rome or to those who ridiculed him, but in obedience to God alone whom he called Father. Though here in the category of what is missed and what is magnified, I cannot help but notice that it was not Jesus’ substance (God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God) as the church later would confess; it was Jesus’ sacrifice that prompted Mark’s confession. It was Jesus’ obedience revealed in a relationship that could only be that of a Son to a Father.

“A contemporary of Jesus,” confirms Eduard Schweizer of Mark, “would be more concerned about a person’s action…than about [his] nature. He would not be interested in the question of whether a person was God’s Son ‘in and of himself’; in fact, he would not have been able to understand such a question.”

Still I think it is precisely that later claim of the church that finds us struggling to confess Jesus as God’s Son. All the while we miss the enormity of Mark’s confession and show ourselves to be no different from the crowds and the disciples and the religious authorities of his day. Therefore like the Jewish crowds of Mark’s gospel, we think Jesus a prophet, perhaps even a prophet of singular repute. We are mistaken, says Mark. Or like the disciples, we confess him to be the Christ and in this confession we are correct as far as it goes. It does not, however, go far enough…go all the way to the cross which, like the disciples, we would just as soon avoid. Or like blind Bartimaeus crying out to be healed by the Son of David and the crowds strewing palms in the path of the bearer of David’s coming kingdom, we speak a partial truth but miss him who is also David’s redeemer.

Our reasons, of course, are different and more sophisticated, we think, than the reasons given in Jesus’ time. The miracles run counter to the laws of nature, we say; the exorcisms presume a pre-Enlightenment worldview; the healings can be explained medically or metaphorically. But the significance of all of these penultimate difficulties with Mark’s gospel is that they become the excuse for our never really doing business with the cross…never coming close enough to behold in Jesus the God who in person is with us and for us even unto death and beyond the grave. Actually we glorify our excuses because if we were to come close to his cross, I think, the person we are with all of our ideas and certainties, with all of our loyalties and lame excuses would surely have to die.

That must in part be why it cannot be “until the end of the story,” according to Mark and in the words of Jack Kingsbury, it cannot be until we stand beneath “the cross that [you and I] can know ‘what’ it means for Jesus to be Messiah Son of God.”

Therefore I ask you again: what is missed and what is magnified if Mark’s gospel is the only gospel we have? Missed are so many of the details by which we excuse ourselves from faith and discipleship. Missed is the church’s metaphysical take on what it means to be God’s Son. Magnified?: Jesus’ suffering and death which alone reveals the Father’s love, a love that has ripped open the heavens, has torn the curtain of the temple, has bid us lose our lives to save them until at last, facing Jesus, we confess, “Truly this man is God’s Son.”

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