Endless Worrying of Ideology

The next section we encounter, as we move backward in Mark, is a collection of disputes Jesus has with various authorities.  The commentators, of course, describe Jesus as the master of these arguments, and the commentators will draw out more and more esoteric reasonings of the exact way in which Jesus is supposed to have laid out his arguments.  This is silly.  Jesus' arguments here were meant to respond to moments, and in addition they were meant to respond within the experience-fields of his immediate hearers--people who had little time in their short lives to contemplate the niceties of theology or moral philosophy.

This begins with Jesus--embarking on what appears to be a single day of disputation in the temple--being asked the source of his authority.  Confronted by "the chief priests, and the scribes, and the elders," they ask him, "By what authority doest thou these things? and who gave thee this authority to do these things?"  As a condition for answering them, Jesus dares the clerics to inform him, "The baptism of John, was it from heaven, or of men? answer me."

Jesus' challenge goes directly to the matter, as I mentioned above, of the audience to these disputes.  Being disinclined to allow that John's baptism was "From heaven" (thereby vindicating Jesus at once), the priests, scribes, and elders are equally loathe to say that John's baptism was "of men"--because "they feared the people."  The constrained context of the public disputation deprives us, unfortunately, of the nuances that such questions can exhibit in extended discourse.

We will never know what turns there could have been to the authorities' reasonings by which it might be stated that the dichotomy of "from heaven, or of men" is ultimately inadequate.  It would be as well that Christians be constrained to say whether this or that Pauline epistle is "from heaven, or of Paul."  Certainly the strains of Christian radio blare thousands upon thousands of hours of opining about how it might best be stated that those epistles were from heaven and Paul both.  The point here is that Christian holdings-forth about biblical authority usually occupy only extended preachings to the congregations, or perhaps extended disputations among academics.

At the street level, in Christian preaching the Bible is either the Word of God or it is not ("not" being given the worst of it.)  We can expect little other from the account we receive of the dispute over Jesus' authority as ratified in the ministry of John the Baptist--John's source of authority was of necessity reduced to an either/or proposition.  This reduction, however, was imposed in the account of the dispute between Jesus and the clerics by the audience in attendance.  Elsewhere, Jesus' teachings contain nuances more than equal to the musings of commentators through the ages.  One need merely consider the intriguing puzzle Jesus presents to the effect that forgiveness--that is, in the profound type of implication--is bestowed both by God and by humans.

We next encounter what is called "The Parable of the Wicked Tenants," or some such.  What is really alarming here, however, is the tendency of some commentators to say that the parable "concerns the Jewish nation," as though the leased vineyard was the Promise of God, and not the people of the Promise.  For it is really (and unmistakably) the nation of Israel that is the vineyard, and the wicked tenants ("husbandmen") are the leaders of Israel, not the people.  It is only the leadership of the nation, after having reneged on the produce of the vineyard and after having "shamefully handled" the collectors of the "lord of the vineyard," who might in any imagining have stood to claim the place of the heir of the lord.

Additionally, the parable passage itself tells us that Jesus' target is the Jewish authorities, who "knew that he had spoken the parable against them."  These priests and scribes and elders have to stand there and take it, much as they would like to have Jesus arrested, and they are restrained, as the text has it, for fear of the audience--"the people."

The ensuing three episodes display the continuing theme of this post: Jesus' arguments here were meant to respond to moments, and in addition they were meant to respond within the experience-fields of his immediate hearers.  The Pharisees and Herodians ask Jesus about the legitimacy of paying taxes, and he demonstrates their "hypocrisy" by doing nothing more than recalling for his interrogators (and the crowds) how the very business of the Judaean economy presumed an accommodation for the overarching interests of the Roman overlords--interests infused in the lives of great and small, in the purses of great and small, and in the transactions of great and small--whether the paying of taxes was the issue of any moment or not.

Asked about the status of marriage after the deaths of all involved, Jesus invokes nothing more than the power of God--which can be taken to resolve any quandary--and the scriptures (at least the elementary scriptures of Creation, which describe marriage as a remediation of the man's state, not as an ideal) such that it is apparent that marriage will have no institutional place in the afterlife.  And as far as the afterlife itself, Jesus invokes the foundational truth that nothing (and no person) that has ever been embraced by the mind of God could ever cease to exist.

Asked by a scribe, "Which is the first commandment of all?"--invoking, of course, the implicit and undemonstrated presumption that there would be such a "first commandment"--Jesus responds with a quick series of scriptural references that describe the oneness and singularity of God, the need for loving God, and the need for loving "thy neighbor as thyself" (this last reference, from Leviticus, being followed by "I am the LORD" in that text.)  The scribe in his presumption gets not the single answer for which he asked, but rather he (with the audience) gets a short course in the necessity of love--a course so simple in its real-life application that Jesus shows no intention to elaborate.  Responding positively to the scribe's declaration that such display of love "is more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices," Jesus says merely, "Thou are not far from the Kingdom of God."

Meanwhile, it must be noted that these disputations and discourses are presented as though they were available to the crowd.  Jesus presents here the puzzle, as he "taught in the temple," of the logically self-defeating notion that a son of David could be the lord of David: "For David himself said by the Holy Ghost, The LORD said to my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand, till I make thine enemies thy footstool."  Jesus does not resolve the puzzle, either for us, or for "the common people," who "heard him gladly."

Then Jesus tells the people to beware the scribes, "which love to go in long clothing" and to be treated with deference, and also to reckon that service to God is not measured by how much one gives, but by how much one has left.  All of these disputations and discourses presume the attendance of the common people, and all of them refer to the experiential and the referential--the attempted focus of this blog--rather than to conceptualizations of existence viewed as it were from above.  Jesus invites the people to understand what they can as viewed through their daily lives, and he invites them to the freedom to reckon that there is much that they will not understand--and not to fear--and not to be caught up in the endless worrying of ideology.