Breaking Down the Barriers

Twelve months ago, Franciscan theologian Richard Rohr visited Australia and was interviewed on ABC Radio National's "Religion Report" (2006). At the time, I was particularly impressed by a point Rohr made in distinguishing between "Christianity" and "Churchianity", where the first constituted a challenge to the status quo, while the second supported the status quo.

Richard Rohr OFM

In his interview with Stephen Crittenden, Richard Rohr briefly talked of his vision of the Christ-event as originally a reform message for all religious devotees, which had become corrupted once the message became a distinct religious movement. After Constantine, Christianity bought into the imperial model of ecclesial polity and lost its original radical critique of that very model.

Whatever one may think of Rohr's grasp of Church history, his distinction between "Christianity" and "Churchianity" opens up a fruitful line for further discussion of the mythology of Mark's Gospel. Written at a time when the Jesus movement was anything but part of the status quo, Mark's Gospel is (as I noted last week) culturally subversive. The problem that confronted the Markan Christians, as it does us today, is to steer a middle course between the twin tensions of conformity to cultural expectations and the vocation to be counter cultural in working for a better world.

Jesus as Cultural Critic…

Of the four Gospel portraits of Jesus, Mark's Jesus is the one who is critical of rigidity and legalism; the one who breaks all the old purity and dietary codes; the one who tears down the walls separating Jew from Gentile, male from female, rich from poor. In many ways, Mark's Jesus movement most closely mirrors that of Paul's which, as we have noted in an earlier commentary (Elmer, 2007), was a "Christianity without boundaries".

Just as new wine will inevitably burst out of old wineskins (Mk 2:22), the movement inaugurated by Jesus in Mark's Gospel has spilled out of Judaism into the Gentile world, whose communities (Mk 3:8; 5:1, 20; 7:31; 8:27) and customs (10:2-12) figure prominently in the narrative (Black, 1994). Mark's Jesus eschews the ethnic particularity of his Jewish co-religionists and seeks out the Gentiles, despite any lingering fears of being polluted by close contact and commerce with them (Mk 7:24-30; cf. 7:18-23).

Similarly, it is notable that in Mark's Gospel positive interactions with Jesus are typically displayed by characters living on society's margins: the leper (1:40-45); the paralytic (2:1-12); the deaf (7:31-37); the blind (8:22-26; 10:46-52); the widow (12:41-44); tax collectors and sinners (2:15). Many of these marginal people were women (5:25-34; 7:24-30; 12:41-44; 14:3-9; 15:40-41). According to Mark, "many" women formed part of Jesus' retinue (15:40-41).

To pursue this last point further, Mark's models of discipleship consistently subvert conventional assumptions about social status. As the Markan Jesus explicitly demonstrates, "many who are first will be last, and the last [notably women, but also the sick, the poor, the lame, servants, slaves and even Gentile demoniacs] will be first" (9:35; cf. 5:19; 10:31, 43-44).

By way of example, those who we might assume to be among the "first in the kingdom", the Twelve "official" disciples, are seen in Mark as bickering among themselves over their own importance (9:33), and clambering over each other to attain exalted positions (10:35-37). They disdain the meek and lowly, especially children (10:13-16). They try to terminate the ministry of a competing disciple because he is not one of them (9:34-41). During his final, fateful clash with the religious authorities in Jerusalem, Jesus is betrayed by one disciple, Judas (14:12), denied by another, Peter (14:66-71), and forsaken by the rest (14:50). Only the women remain to share his suffering (15:40-41), anoint his body (16:1) and, accordingly, are the "first" to be commissioned to proclaim the resurrection (16:7).

Mark's Gospel is essentially about the identity of Jesus, which is announced right up front in the opening line: "The beginning of the good news about Jesus the Christ, the Son of God" (1:1). Jesus identity as the suffering Messiah and Son of God is initially kept secret and recognised only by the demons whom he casts out of the possessed and the infirm whom he heals (1:34, 44; 3:12; 5:43; 7:36; 8:26, 30; 9:9). His true identity as God's son is only definitively recognised, as we noted last week, by pagan Roman centurion who witnessed Jesus' suffering, death and resurrection (15:39).

In Mark, Jesus is man who haunts the fringes of society, fraternising with the marginalised, touching the untouchables, speaking to those with whom he should not speak and, thereby, breaking the taboos of his Jewish faith. As Richard Rohr points out, Jesus was not an "insider" or a "company man" (Rohr, 2006). Mark's Jesus refuses to operate within the boundaries set by Jewish orthopraxy. He is not interested in "Churchianity" — that is, sticking to rules that govern membership in the club or the "ekklesia" (assembly or church). He is a rule breaker; and it is this view of Jesus that informs the very structure of the Markan Gospel.

Crossing the Boundaries…

We have noted that Mark's Gospel is primarily a journey narrative, which traces Jesus' missionary wanderings from Galilee to Jerusalem. In Mark, however, the travel details are apparently meant to be taken as theologically significant, rather than geographically accurate. Let me give you a pertinent example.

A close reading of Mark's Gospel might suggest to us that the Evangelist was clueless when it came to the geography of Palestine. By way of demonstration try and trace on a map of first-century Palestine the trip Jesus makes with his disciples as described by Mark 7:31:

"Then he returned from the region of Tyre, and went by way of Sidon towards the Sea of Galilee, in the region of the Decapolis".

These details seem to make no sense. Jesus seems to travel north in order to go south via an inexplicable detour to the south-east. But all this makes perfect sense when we realise that, for Mark, the landscape is seen in its broad political divisions — Jews in Galilee and Judaea (on the western side of the Sea of Galilee), Gentiles in the areas of Phoenicia (Tyre and Sidon) and the Decapolis and Iturea (on the eastern side of the Sea of Galilee). For Mark, Jesus' crossing of the Sea of Galilee, or Jesus' journey north beyond the borders of Galilee is tantamount to crossing boundaries — not just political, but also ethnic and religious.

Mark 7:31 is significant in that it delineates an important aspect of Mark's understanding of Jesus' missions — yes! "missions", plural. Mark's Jesus launches two missions: one to the Jews (symbolised by the feeding of the 5000 on Jewish territory in Mark 6:34-44) and the other to Gentiles (symbolised by the feeding of the 4000 on Gentile Territory in Mark 8:1-10).

Similarly, Jesus heals both Jews (eg. Mark 5:1-43), after which he is rejected by "his own people" (Mk 6:4; cf. parallel with John the Baptist, which prefigures Jesus' own death at the hands of the civil authorities in 6:17-29), and crosses the boundaries to heal Gentiles (7:24-37; 8:22-26). In between all this we have Jesus rejecting the purity codes that dictated the divisions between Jew and Gentile (7:1-23).

It is probably for this reason that the authors of Matthew and Luke were sufficiently shocked by Mark's account of Jesus' equal opportunity policy as to wish to rewrite Mark. By the late eighties, when Matthew and Luke are writing, Mark's Jesus is simply too challenging. His critical attitude towards Jesus' disciples (which Luke glosses over), his positive assessment of the women in Jesus' retinue (similarly qualified by both Matthew and Luke), his dismissive approach to Jewish orthopraxy (still maintained in the Matthean community), and his claim that Jesus established a mission to Gentiles (rejected by both Matthew and Luke) sets Mark apart from the other Synoptists. It would seem, based on their reworking of Mark, that in their opinion Mark's Jesus was not sufficiently "churchly". Markan Christianity appears to have been akin to, if not a part of, Paul's Christianity sans Frontieres.

Final Reflections…

When we attempt to read the Gospel of Mark as a straight forward biographical report, we miss the rich nuances and deep insight with which the author has crafted this first gospel. Mark probably knew very little about the details of Jesus life, except the traditions preserved by his community (normally assumed to be in Rome). It is his hand which arranging those traditions, augments them with fanciful details, and creates travel narratives to stitch them all together in a story that speaks of breaking old and rigid boundaries that separate people from each other.

In this, the Evangelist probably owes far more to Paul than he does to the original followers of Jesus. This in itself further demonstrates the extent to which the Markan Evangelist was truly clueless about the historical Jesus. Still, there are always some benefits to having a "outside" person view a familiar story. Not that Mark was an "outsider" - if he were, he could be easily dismissed. But Mark's Gospel appears to have gained rapidly in popularity and to have spread widely throughout the Jesus movement. This is why his very confronting Jesus story could not be ignored by the likes of Matthew and Luke.

Like Matthew and Luke, those of us on the "inside" are so often caught between the demands to conform to a "Churchianity" that always exists in tension with the inherent, radical and marginal character of "Christianity". Still, it is in holding the two ends of this tension together that we can help to move the Church forward by moving her back to her origins. Mark's Gospel serves to remind us of this; it is, after all, the story of "beginning of the good news" (Mk 1:1). Something of this is also aptly captured by Richard Rohr's comment (2006):

"When you live on the edge of the inside, you will almost wish you were outside. Then you are merely an enemy, a pagan, a persona non grata, and can largely be ignored or written off. But if you are both inside and outside, you are the ultimate threat, the ultimate reformer, and the ultimate invitation."

Bibliography and Further Reading:
Black, C. C. (1994), Mark: Images of an Apostolic Interpreter (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press).
Crittenden, S. (2006), "Interview with Father Richard Rohr OFM" The Religion Report, ABC Radio National November 15. URL: www.abc.net.au/rn/religionreport/stories/2006/1788767.htm
Elmer, I. J. (2007), "Christianity sans Frontieres" Catholica Australia February 10.
URL: www.catholica.com.au/ianstake/025_it_100207.php
Rohr, R. (2006), "On the Edge of the Inside: The Prophetic Position" Centre for Action and Contemplation. URL: www.malespirituality.org/prophetic_position.htm

Photo Credits:
"St Mark" St Ignatius of Loyola, Cincinnati (2007)
URL: www.sainti.org/church/stainedglass/StMark.jpg
"Fr Richard Rohr OFM" Centre for Action and Contemplation (2007).
URL: www.cacradicalgrace.org/conferences/tension/graphics/rohr-pressphoto.jpg
"Palestine in Jesus' Time" The Nazarene Way of Essenic Studies (2007)
URL: www.thenazareneway.com/spca/a_palestine_map_jesus_time.gif
"Reverendfun" © 2006 Gospel Communications URL: www.reverendfun.com/?date=20060516

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©2007 Ian Elmer

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