Lent 1B Gospel
Eric Paul
I met Claire a couple years ago as a pastor in Nashville. She would occasionally come into the Co-op for breakfast and lunch. She seemed to always have a chip on her shoulder. Claire lived out on the streets, moving from tent site to tent site when the other urban campers would show their dissatisfaction with her. Claire could take care of herself. She was strong-willed and assertive, even as she suffered through various mental illnesses. She always gave the impression of not being totally present, as if her mind was slightly off-kilter from her body.
I led a congregation of mostly homeless neighbors and low-income families. We’d have anywhere between 150-200 people come each Sunday night for a table fellowship meal. Each year, the church I worked at would throw a big pizza party and watch the Super Bowl in the gym. This was just one of the ways we worked toward inclusion into a cultural system that by and large excludes many of the poor from normal everyday relationships. 100 million people watch the super bowl each year, but many on the streets don’t get that opportunity. So we do our best to include everyone.
This particular night, Claire started to make her way through the pizza line. One of our volunteers from the church was helping to serve and locked eyes with her asking, “What would you like?” (Referring to the kind of pizza available: cheese, pepperoni, veggie?)
And without missing a beat, Claire proclaimed, “Justice.”
Claire clearly and simplistically touched on an essential truth, a truth she experienced each and everyday living without a house. That is, all is not well with the world. Our world is out of sorts, our relationships with one another and the created world around us are marked more by strain and brokenness than by righteousness and health. Claire knew that her life witnessed to the massive injustice of homelessness in America.
But even more, hiding behind her demand for justice was the veiled critique that a “charity” pizza party isn’t justice. She waited for something more radical, more subversive, something apocalyptic in scope that would dramatically change the way things are. “Justice,” she demanded of the church.
I like to think that Jesus would have known and been friends with Claire before he burst on the scene in the Gospel of Mark. The Gospel writer skips the important genealogy and immediately introduces Jesus as a person from an obscure town in a region cut off politically and religiously from Jerusalem, predominately poor, and heavily populated by Gentiles. Jesus just shows up on the scene just like anyone else coming to the river to see John the Baptist.[1]
But the mundane and anonymous origin story Mark ascribes to Jesus is quickly interrupted as Jesus emerges from the river: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.” We don’t know if the voice is heard by others on the scene, but Mark seems to be working quickly with the historical narrative of Israel liberated from Egypt but through the lens of the Prophets:
“Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down…to make your name known to your enemies and cause the nations to tremble before you” (Is. 64:1-2)
“Here is my Servant, whom I uphold, my chosen one in whom I delight; I will put my Spirit on Him and he will bring justice to the nations” (Is. 42:1).
And the royal hymn on the Psalmist, “The kings of the earth take their stand and the rulers gather together against the Lord and against his Anointed One…I have installed my King on Zion, my holy hill. I will proclaim the decree of the Lord: He said to me, “You are my Son; today I have become your Father” (Psalm 2:2,6-7).
We often get caught up in the meaning of Jesus’ individuality as a person, especially when it comes to his baptism. Why would a sinless man need to be baptized? Mark doesn’t have time for such musings. He’s building here a narrative of cosmic and political significance. Here in this moment is an “eruption of the real” (to steal a concept from Zizek), a divine unveiling between the world as it is and the world that Jesus brings. If baptism is that moment in which we turn toward life in God, it is also a turning away from the things of this world that bring death. It is a baptism of repentance (a turning), but also a baptism of resistance against a dying order so that a new world may emerge. Jesus’ baptism symbolizes this renunciation and complete commitment to the task of Sonship by turning away from the world as it is currently ordered.
Here is Jesus, the King and Anointed One of God who takes his stand — as the Psalmist says — against the ‘kings of this earth.’ And, yet this King takes on the role of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 42.
Mark alludes to the reality that all of Israel is now gathered and represented within this person and that Israel’s task of bringing Justice to the nations is now becoming a reality. We see Mark tell this story by immediately driving Jesus into the wilderness for forty days.
Mark then moves Jesus geographically once more. He came from Nazareth in Galilee to the Jordan, is sent by the Spirit to the desert, and then Enters the Land. Unlike John, who has people come to him in the Jordan region (a calling out), Jesus enters in. Like the Incarnation, we see Jesus going back to obscurity, entering the context of the poor, forgotten, and excluded in Galilee. It is here that we hear the theological frame that guides all of Mark’s gospel.
“The time has come,” he said. “The Kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the Good News” (Mark 1:15).
Gerhard Lohfink rightly points to the order in which this proclamation occurs. That is, “the action of God comes first, not the acts of human beings. God has taken the initiative. God alone gives the basileia. It is for the people of God to respond. God’s action makes human action possible” (134). God dislodges our tendency to think in cause-effect rationalizations. If I repent, then God will respond. If I confess, then the Kingdom will come. If I pray, then God will forgive. But this isn’t the order of things. God has already done all of these things in and through the work of Jesus Christ. The question isn’t whether Jesus will become Lord of my life. The burden isn’t on God to act; God has already done that. The onus is on us. As Lohfink continues, “The ‘not yet’ of the reign of God thus does not result from God’s holding back, but from the hesitant conversion of people” (138). Because Jesus is Lord, how will we change our life? Because Justice is made possible in and through the Anointed One, how will the church re-organize itself to reflect the Justice of the Lord?
The night of the Superbowl, everyone had left by halftime; more interested in finding a warm place to sleep than finishing a fleeting cultural moment. What does the Reign of God mean for such as these? What does justice look like for our neighbors and community? Mark would have us believe that God’s work of restoration has already begun, and repentance just might give us the eyes to see it.
[1] In this paragraph and to follow, I rely on the following commentary.
Meyers, Ched, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus; Orbis Books, Maryknoll, NY. 2008.
Comments