April 1, 2012
David Timbs
The Week of the Failure
Beginning
today, Palm Sunday, the Church begins probably the most symbolically intensive
season of its liturgical life. Ironically, this week involves a kind of symbolic
overload. It is the time when Christians are invited through the power of Memory
to walk with Jesus during the last few days of his earthly life. It is Passion
Week, but this week which was one, maybe three years, in the making.
The
significance of these days lies not just in what happened in the extremely
confronting drama of their unfolding, but in the story of what came before. The
story began and ended in Galilee with that critical pause in Jerusalem which
marked the conclusion of the old age of grace and revelation and the beginning
of the new.
The
characters are the constants in the narrative: God, Jesus, his followers, the
crowds and the Jewish religious leaders. The story’s plot line involves God,
through the evangelist, offering the divine estimation of Jesus as Israel’s
anointed one (Messiah) and as God’s Son, the chosen one (Mk 1: 9-11, 9: 8). It
is a story of ever developing, heightening and intensifying conflict and it all
comes to a head during that week in Jerusalem.
Mark’s
narrative, the most deceptively simple of the four Gospels, offers a sense of
immediacy, urgency and unembellished, confronting krisis about God’s normative
view of Jesus of Nazareth. This krisis,
or moment of choice, involves that tensions and boundaries which separate the
worlds of unfaith, inadequate faith and
genuine faith.
The
story begins with John the Baptizer, the great Elijah figure, announcing the Way
of the Lord and the time of Israel’s repentance in preparation for the
coming of the Messiah. The prophet Malachi describes the final act of Elijah,
Behold, I
will send you Elijah, the prophet before the great and terrible day of the Lord
comes. And he will turn the hearts of parents to their children and the hearts
of children to their parents, lest I come and smite the land with a curse.
(Mal 4: 5-6).
The
Disciples
The
closest disciples of Jesus, even the chosen twelve, never appreciate or grasp
the private disclosure to them of Jesus identity as Messiah and Son of God.
Peter, the representative disciple, can only arrive at a thoroughly inadequate
understanding of what God intends the Messiah to be.
Peter
reflects the dominant messianic expectation of the time, that a militant
anointed one would vindicate Israel by restoring a Theocracy and pure Torah
observance. The disciples cannot accept that God’s Messiah would be the
rejected, the suffering and murdered one and that discipleship would involve the
same (Mk 8:
27-38 [31-36]). Israel and the disciples are confronted with a radical
denial of their expectations. Jesus is a failure.
The
Crowds
The
crowds in the Gospel narrative
represent those who encounter Jesus and hear his preaching and witness the
miracles but never arrive at anything remotely like an adequate
faith. The best understanding they come to is the recognition that he might be one
of the prophets (Mk 8: 27-28) and their typical response is amazement.
At worst they display the characteristics of the fickle mob, gang up against
Jesus, join in the chorus of denunciation and howl for his death (Mk 15: 6-15).
Jesus is a failed popular entertainer.
The
religious Leaders of Israel
The
leaders of Israel, the Scribes,
Pharisees and Sadducees are critical characters in the narrative plot. Their
grounds for rejecting Jesus as Israel’s Messiah are both simple and totally
expected: Jesus, in their estimation, does mighty works not by the finger of God
but by the power of Satan he casts out Satan (Mk 3: 22); Jesus is permanently
ritually unclean as a result of his
contact with those suffering from diseases and blood taboos and even the dead.
Furthermore, Jesus is held in deep suspicion not only by Israel’s leaders but
even by his own family for mixing with the wrong
people, the demonised and the marginal
(Mk 1: 40-45; 3: 19-35; 5: 21-43).
The
religious leaders of Israel were convinced that Jesus was a teacher who put the
faith of the people at risk, threatened their own authority and therefore had to
be done away with. They conspired with the politicians to destroy him (Mk 3: 6).
Jesus is a failed category error.
Their
plots, the fickle unfaith of the crowds and the inadequate faith of Jesus inner circle all coalesce in that week in
Jerusalem. Jesus is publicly repudiated and condemned by Israel leaders,
religious and political, by the crowds and by the Imperium. The drama becomes
the ultimate tragedy when the trusted
insiders of the Jesus Movement lose
any nerve they might have had, deny him, abandon him and take flight. Fear and
cowardice come together to subvert even their inadequate faith. Jesus was a disappointment to them all.
It
is one of the most striking paradoxes of the Markan story that the final
estimation of Jesus, his life, message and ministry, is not the judgment on a
failed man but on God’s plan actually and successfully accomplished at the
very moment of humiliation, failure and defeat.
The
Centurion who oversaw the crucifixion of Jesus was an officer of the Tenth Roman
Legion. Their emblem was the running wild boar. Maybe this is an inside joke, a
Jewish folkloric reference behind the graphic imagery of the Gadarene swine. So,
here Mark has the despised, unclean foreign Imperial oppressor, under the banner
of the filthy, unclean pig, standing at the foot of a crucified criminal, an
unclean Jewish reject. Seeing the manner in which the condemned criminal and
religious heretic dies, the Roman outsider proclaims and confesses, now beneath
a cross with a Galilean peasant nailed to it, a faith that is complete
and adequate, Truly this man was the Son of God
(Mk 15: 39).
The
empty tomb and the Resurrection await us with their own quiet and
confronting moment of krisis.
David
Timbs writes from Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.