The Gospel of Mark

A Liturgical Reading

Bobertz, Charles A.

• Editorial: Baker Academic
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781493405718
• Categoría: Theology & Religion
• Categoría: Biblical Studies

How Baptism and the Eucharist Shaped Early Christian Understandings of Jesus Long before the Gospel writers put pen to papyrus, the earliest Christians participated in the powerful rituals of baptism and the Lord's Supper, which fundamentally shaped their understanding of God, Christ, and the world in which they lived. In this volume, a respected biblical scholar and teacher explores how cultural anthropology and ritual studies elucidate ancient texts. Charles Bobertz offers a liturgical reading of the Gospel of Mark, arguing that the Gospel is a narrative interpretation of early Christian ritual. This fresh, responsible, and creative proposal will benefit scholars, professors, and students. Its ecclesial and pastoral ramifications will also be of interest to church leaders and pastors.

1

The Early Gentile Mission and Explanation

1:1–4:34

Mark 1

Baptismal Death and Resurrection

The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. As it is written in Isaiah the prophet: “Behold I send my messenger in front of you, who will prepare your way [hodos]”; a voice of one crying in the wilderness [erēmos], “Prepare the way [hodos] of the Lord, immediately make straight his path.”

And John the Baptizer came into the wilderness [erēmos] preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And there came out to him everyone from the region of Judea and all of Jerusalem, and they were baptized by him in the river Jordan confessing their sins. John was clothed in camel’s hair, and had a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. And he preached, saying, “One who is stronger than I is coming behind me. I am not fit to bend down and loosen the straps of his sandals. I have baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”

And it happened in those days that Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized in the Jordan River by John. And immediately resurrecting [anabainō] from the water, he saw the heavens split [schizō] and the Spirit descending as a dove enter into him. And a voice came from the heavens: “You are my beloved Son. I am well pleased with you.” And immediately the Spirit cast him into the wilderness [erēmos]. (1:1–12)

Jesus dies and rises from the dead in the first chapter of Mark. He does so through the ritual of baptism, that is, the way (hodos). As Paul tells us in Romans 6:3–4, some early Christians of Mark’s time considered the ritual of immersion in water to be the enactment of a ritual death in Christ out of which the new Christian rises to a new reality, to be, as Paul states it, in newness of life (kainotēti zōēs). There is no guarantee, of course, that this is the basis on which Mark is presenting the story of Jesus’s baptism, but there are plenty of clues in the opening verses that would bring the liturgical reader of Mark1 to realize the connection here between Jesus’s ritual baptism, his death on the cross, and his resurrection into “newness of life.”

Mark begins his narrative with an announcement taken from the prophets Malachi and Isaiah:

“Behold I send my messenger in front of you, who will prepare your way [hodos]”; a voice of one crying in the wilderness [erēmos], “Prepare the way [hodos] of the Lord.”2

The prophet Malachi identifies this messenger with Elijah (Mal. 4:5), and so the reader of Mark understands that Elijah has now returned in the person of John the Baptist.3 His voice crying out in the wilderness echoes the prophet Isaiah and in doing so sets the stage for the entire narrative structure of Mark to be the fulfillment of the ancient prophecy of Isaiah:

A voice crying in the wilderness [erēmos], prepare the way [hodos] of the Lord, make the paths of our God straight. All valleys will be filled, and all mountains and hills made low. Crooked paths will be straightened, and rough patches made smooth. And the glory of the Lord will be seen [horaō], and all flesh [pasa sarx] will see [horaō] the salvation of God because the Lord has spoken. (Isa. 40:3–5 LXX)4

Four key aspects to this prophecy set out the structure of Mark’s narrative: (1) wilderness, (2) the way, (3) all flesh, and (4) to see the salvation of God.

As I will discuss in detail later in this book, the first eight chapters of Mark build toward two successive ritual meal gatherings which take place in the wilderness (erēmos; 6:32; 8:4). In the first meal narrative Mark describes, per Isaiah here, an exodus on dry land: the Gentiles arrive in the wilderness by land prior to Jesus and the Jewish disciples, who come by water (6:33–34). In the second ritual meal narrative in the wilderness, now in a Gentile place, Jesus tells his disciples to feed the Gentiles so that they do not falter on the way (hodos), namely, the way of Jesus toward passion and death (8:3).5 Following the second meal narrative, and again on two separate occasions, Jesus cures a blind man. The first blind man comes to see clearly that the Gentiles have indeed come to eat the one loaf with the Jews (8:22–26), and the second blind man, the Gentile “son of Timaeus,” comes to recognize (see) Jesus as the Son of David and then asks to follow Jesus on the way (hodos) to Jerusalem and his passion and death (10:52). Toward the end of the narrative, at the Last Supper immediately before his death, Jesus declares that the body of Christ, Jews and Gentiles (all flesh), has been gathered and that he will pour out his blood as the new covenant for the many (14:22–23). And so at his trial before the Sanhedrin Jesus declares that everyone will see (horaō) him coming on the clouds of heaven, that is, all will see the salvation of God (14:62).

Thus for the liturgical reader of Mark a great deal of the basic structure of the entire narrative is established in the opening announcement of the Isaiah-Malachi prophecy. The church of Jews and Gentiles (all flesh) will be gathered in the wilderness for the Lord’s Supper in order to follow Jesus on the way to his passion and death in Jerusalem, followed by his resurrection and imminent return on the clouds of heaven for all to see. Yet in the meantime there will be misunderstanding, betrayal, and abandonment. And all of this, the story of Jesus and the story of the church, will be enacted in the narrated and performed rituals of baptism and meal.

Baptism and Cross

And John the Baptizer came into the wilderness preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And there came out to him everyone from the region of Judea and all of Jerusalem, and they were baptized by him in the river Jordan confessing their sins. John was clothed in camel’s hair, and had a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. And he preached, saying, “One who is stronger than I is coming behind me. I am not fit to bend down and loosen the straps of his sandals. I have baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” (1:4–8)

From the time even before Mark’s Gospel to the present day there has been the expectation with the Jewish tradition that the prophet Elijah, who in the biblical story had been taken up in the fiery chariot to heaven (2 Kings 2:11), would someday return to usher in the messianic age.6 Mark now continues to link the opening of the Gospel, the appearance of John (Elijah) baptizing people in the Jordan River in the wilderness, with the future death of Jesus on the cross, that is, the death which inaugurates the messianic age.

So it is that at the end of the narrative the utterance of the bystander at the cross, “Let us see whether Elijah comes to pull him down” (15:36), is filled with specific irony tied to the beginning of the Gospel: if Elijah would pull Jesus from the cross, there would be no death and no ushering in of God’s reign through his death. So also if Jesus had not been baptized by John (Elijah) into his own death to begin the Gospel, there would be no ministry, no ushering in of God’s reign, in the narrative that follows.

So it is at the cross in the very next moment that Jesus dies and gives out the Spirit (ekpneō; 15:37).7 Jesus thereby fulfills with his death at the end of the narrative what John predicts at the opening of the Gospel: “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit” (1:8). This Spirit which comes from the death of Jesus is in fact the same Spirit that Jesus receives at his baptism, the ritual being distinctly narrated by Mark:

And it happened in those days that Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized in the Jordan River by John. And immediately resurrecting [anabainō] from the water, he saw the heavens split [schizō] and the Spirit descending as a dove enter into him. And a voice came from the heavens: “You are my beloved Son. I am well pleased with you.” And immediately the Spirit cast him into the wilderness [erēmos]. (1:9–12)

Reaching out to his readers who have also experienced the ritual of baptism, Mark would have these readers understand that Jesus enters into his own ritual death and resurrection in the baptism by John. Jesus resurrects (anabainō) from the waters of death. And at this moment the heavens are torn (schizō) and the Spirit descends upon Jesus. Again at the death of Jesus on the cross, and at the very moment the Spirit is released, the temple curtain is torn (schizō; 15:38).

For the reader of Mark it is as if the Spirit smashes through the curtain all the way back to the beginning of Mark’s Gospel. The end and the beginning of the narrative have come together, and the events in the narrative will tell the story of Jesus, who must die because he has already died in baptism.8 It is only by passing through death that Jesus becomes the resurrected beloved Son (1:11), who establishes the church, the body of Christ, in the narrative of Mark (14:22). It is only by their own endurance in persecution (13:9), including martyrdom as the fulfillment of their own baptismal death (8:34–35; 10:38–39), that the Christians in Mark’s church, the body of Christ, Jews and Gentiles of the one loaf a generation later, can soon be gathered with Christ in the resurrection (8:35; 13:27). In short, a generation after Jesus’s death on the cross, Mark will write the story of a faithful martyr Jesus as the unfinished story of the church of Mark.

When Jesus rises out of the chaotic waters of baptism, the Spirit as a dove enters into him, and a voice from the heavens proclaims that Jesus is the Son of God (1:11).9 Jesus is then driven by this same Spirit into the wilderness. Liturgical readers find themselves drawn into both the story of Noah (the dove),10 a story of new creation from the chaotic waters of the flood, and the story of Israel in the book of Exodus, a story of the creation of Israel in the wilderness out of the chaotic waters of the Red Sea (Exod. 15:1–22). As did Israel in the exodus event, Jesus here sojourns with God in the wilderness.

The Wilderness

And he was in the wilderness [erēmos] for forty days being tested by Satan. And he was with the wild beasts, and the angels ministered to him. (1:12–13)

The encounter with Satan in this wilderness sets yet another stage for the unfolding narrative drama.11 For forty days—an obvious allusion to the forty years Israel spent in the wilderness—Jesus is put on trial by Satan. In an extension of the cosmic struggle between Jesus and Satan that is present throughout the narrative, Satan and the demons are introduced to the reader as the enemy of Christ, the resurrected one who, through his death (just ritually enacted), establishes the new people amid a new creation. Here as in Eden the wild beasts are apparently friendly (Gen. 1:30; Isa. 11:6–7). The liturgical reader knows why Satan and the demons know Jesus: chaos is the sworn enemy of creation. Hence the entire narrative will now unfold as a cosmic struggle between the forces of chaos (cosmic and human opponents of Jesus) and creation. The earthly opponents’ desire to “destroy” Jesus (3:6; 11:18), and even the fear and opacity of the Jewish disciples (4:40; 6:50; 8:4), are part of the larger opposition of chaos to creation manifest in the crucified (baptized) and resurrected Christ and his gathering of Jews and Gentiles in the ritual meal (6:30–44; 8:1–9; 14:18–31). The central irony of the narrative is that the destruction of Jesus can result only in the resurrection of Jesus: as in the creation story of Genesis, the flood story, and the story of the exodus, creation overcomes chaos. This truth is manifest in the narrative already in the opening ritual of Jesus’s baptism: Jesus must die in order to be the resurrected Christ (creation) in the narrative that follows.

And after John was betrayed, Jesus came into Galilee preaching the gospel of God. He said, “The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God draws near. Repent and believe in the gospel.” And passing by the Sea [thalassa] of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew, the brother of Simon, casting [nets] into the sea. For they were fishermen. And Jesus said to them, “Come behind me and I will make you become fishermen of humans.” And immediately they left the nets and followed him. And going along a bit further, he saw James, son of Zebedee, and his brother John. And they were mending nets in the boat. And immediately he called them, and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired hands, and they went and followed him. (1:14–20)

After Jesus confronts Satan in the wilderness, he selects four disciples by the Sea (thalassa) of Galilee, an initial indication of the centrality of the Gentile mission in the narrative. A quite ordinary lake in Galilee has been designated as the sea, intimating to the liturgical reader the primev...