Now after that John was put in prison
Jesus came into
Galilee....
My heart sinks when anyone starts to talk about Biblical
Geography, particularly if it involves Miss Beale's black and white
slides of her trip to the Holy Land in the 1950s.
But I have managed to bang the following basic facts into my head.
- Israel is the whole land claimed by the descendants of Joseph and his brothers in the Old Testament.
- When the land became a monarchy, Israel referred to the Northern Kingdom as opposed to the Southern Kingdom which was known as Judah. (Judah was the nice brother who didn't want to sell Joseph to the Ishmalites. A hairy crew. The kingdom of Judah was populated by his descendants. The descendants of the other ten brothers lived in Israel. Making twelve altogether. It's complicated.)
- By the time of Mark's Gospel, the land of Israel is split in three. Galilee, at the top of the map; Judea, at the bottom, and Samaria in the middle. (Yes, I too always imagined Samaria as being a far-away land; but a straight path from Nazareth to Jerusalem would take you through it. I also thought of Galilee as a sleepy little sea-side town, but it is in fact the name of the whole province.)
- The Galileans, the Samaritans and the Judeans all claim descent from Jacob and all claim to follow the teachings of Moses; but they understand those laws differently: very differently indeed in the case of the Samaritans. Which is why the Galileans don't like them very much and the Judeans don't like them at all.
- People who live in Judea are Judeans (Ioudaios); their religion became known as Judaism. Jesus was in a modern sense Jewish but he wasn't a Judean. This will lead to heaps of confusion later on.
- Down in the South is the salty Dead Sea; up in the North is the freshwater Sea of Galilee. They are connected by the River Jordan.
- Nazareth is a long day's stroll away from the sea of Galilee; but it would take a week's hike to get from Nazareth to Jerusalem.
Will that do?
and saying,
"The time is fulfilled,
and the kingdom of God is at hand:
repent ye,
and believe the gospel."
We have been told that this book is the "gospel of Jesus". Now Jesus finally speaks: he announces something called "the gospel of God" and calls on people to "believe the gospel."
"Gospel" is another dusty church word. At best it means
the second reading on Sunday morning; at worst, a form of religiously
inspired pop music. The first four books of the New Testament are the
"gospels"; any scrap of parchment with Jesus' name in it is
immediately heralded as "the fifth gospel".
The English Bible translators couldn't find a straightforward
English equivalent of Mark's word euangelion, although once or twice
they render it as "glad tidings." Literally it means "good message"; but they made up their own word:
godspell. Which, as everyone knows, means Good News although it could be
understood as God's News. But Good News is not much of an improvement over Gospel,
from our point of view. It is redolent of over-earnest street
preachers ("have you heard the good news about Jesus?") and
the dreadful Good News Bible.
The meanings of words expand and contract with the centuries. C.S
Lewis talks about "the dangerous sense": where the modern
meaning of a word is almost, but not exactly, the same as its archaic
meaning, so students are in danger of misreading it. The word good once primarily meant "holy and pious" but now it primarily
means "excellent". So the godspell may actually be the Holy News. Spell originally meant something like "narrative" or
"recitation": we still talk about advertising spiel or political spiel. It doesn't take too much imagination
to see how recitation could come to mean "tidings", "message" or "news". Neither does it take too much imagination to see how the same word could evolve along a quite different pathway, so that in modern English spell primarily means "a poem recited by a witch".
This book, the Glad Tidings According to Mark, contains the
glad tidings about Jesus. Jesus proclaimed the glad tidings about God. And what were those glad tidings? Like John, Jesus says that something important is about
to happen but hasn't happened yet. Like John, Jesus says that people
need to change their minds and get ready for this thing which is
about to happen. But unlike John, Jesus says that as well as repenting, you have to believe. Believe what? The glad tidings themselves.
But what, exactly, are these glad tidings? What is the content of
God's message? We aren't told. It almost seems that Jesus is announcing the Gospel, but at the same time, keeping it secret.
Perhaps the good spiel really is God's advertising pitch. Pitches often work like this. You offer a teaser as bait, and then,
once people are interested, you reel them in....
Now as he walked by the sea of Galilee,
he saw Simon and Andrew his brother
casting a net into the sea:
for they were fishers.
and Jesus said unto them,
"Come ye after me
and I will make you to become fishers of men."
and straightway they forsook their nets,
and followed him
and when he had gone a little farther thence,
he saw James the son of Zebedee
and John his brother,
who also were in the ship mending their nets.
And straightway he called them:
and they left their father Zebedee in the ship with the hired servants
and went after him.
Mark's gospel sometimes comes across as a sequence of tiny little
folk-memories; a collection of stanzas or proverbs. Most scholars
think that the individual narrative units are older than the text; that the book
we call Mark is the result of someone taking these fragments and
stitching them together.
That is how these lines sound to me. As if someone is repeating an
oft-told tale about a thing which a disciple of a disciple remembered
happening. There doesn't seem to be any mystery or secret meaning
hiding beneath the surface. It feels like we are slipping back a
thousand years and seeing events unfold.
A man walks by the sea; he sees two men. He beckons, says a few
words we don't quite catch; and they go with him. He walks along a
bit further and sees two more men; they join the group. Where there
was one there are now five.
I suppose they are all leaving footprints in the sand.
The first words we hear Jesus speak are almost a joke. Not "Come and help me redeem Israel." Not "Come and join in
what's going to become literally the biggest story in history." But "I
see you haven't caught any fish. Want to have a go at catching people
instead?"
Simon and Andrew and James and John do not seem, particularly, to
be responding to a message. They don't say "This Good News stuff
sounds brilliant, we want to hear more" or "Yeah. we've
been hoping for something like this Kingdom thing. Mind if we come along?" They follow Jesus because Jesus tells them to follow him. If you think that Jesus was a social reformer, a revolutionary, a
pacifist, or a mystic these passages will not be much help to you.
The big deal about Jesus is that he is Jesus.
NOTE: It is generally agreed that Andrew was the best disciple.
And they went into Capernaum
and straightway on the sabbath day
he entered into the synagogue
and taught
and they were astonished at his doctrine:
for he taught them as one that had authority
and not as the scribes.
When I was a kid we went to Butlins a few times. They still had old-fashioned sea-side variety shows, with conjurers and impressionists and comedians. I remember one comedian more or less dying on the stage, eliciting no more than a polite chuckle from the audience. The following night a different comedian had the same audience almost literally rolling in the aisles with hysterical laughter. Despite the fact that he was telling exactly the same jokes.
One of the oldest surviving Christian texts—some people think it
is even older than the New Testament—is known as the didache: The
Teaching. or The Doctrine. In the previous passage, Jesus was
preaching his glad tidings—announcing or proclaiming them. Here, he
is teaching: dispensing didache. .
Mark says that people were astonished by this
Doctrine. But, maddeningly, he doesn't tell us what Jesus actually
said. Either he didn't know, or he knew and didn't think it was
important. What he wants us to know is that the congregation
recognized a quality called Authority behind the words; and that this
left them dumbfounded; stunned; boggled.
And there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit
And he cried out, saying,
"Let us alone;
What have we to do with thee
thou Jesus of Nazareth?
art thou come to destroy us?
I know thee who thou art
the Holy One of God."
And Jesus rebuked him, saying,
"Hold thy peace
and come out of him."
and when the unclean spirit had torn him,
and cried with a loud voice,
he came out of him.
and they were all amazed,
insomuch that they questioned among themselves, saying,
"What thing is this?
What new doctrine is this?
For with authority commandeth he even the unclean spirits,
and they do obey him."
and immediately his fame spread abroad
throughout all the region round about Galilee.
A few lines ago, John the Baptist was saying that his successor would baptize people in the holy ghost; and we were watching the holy ghost flutter
down from heaven and land on Jesus. But now Jesus confronts a man who
is inhabited by an unclean spirit. A dirty ghost.
Jesus tells the
dirty ghost to go away, and away it goes.
Jesus' audience are stunned because he preaches to them with
authority; and they are equally stunned because he uses his authority to give orders to the dirty ghost. The two events are somehow the
same. The people don't think that Jesus is a preacher and also
an exorcist. Somehow, they think that it is his doctrine that has made the dirty
ghost go away. Or that the casting out of the ghost sums is part and parcel of the doctrine.
What they take away from both the sermon and the
miracle is that Jesus has exousian, authority.
Ezekiel, in the Old Testament, was told to prophecy—preach—to the dry bones. No-one ever told us what he said: it was the very
act of prophesying which brought the bones back to life. (The ankle
bone connected to the shin bone; the shin bone connected to the thigh
bone...) I think something similar is happening here. It is something
in the words, a supernatural quality, which leaves the
congregation stunned and the actual forces of evil running away. The
words themselves don't matter; they have power because Jesus is
speaking them.
It's not the jokes; it's the way you tell them.
It's not what he preaches; it's the way that he preaches it.
It's a recitation. An incantation.
God's Spell.
Coming soon: Lepers! Married Popes! Cripples!