The last post, dealing with what is to be gleaned from the Gospel of Mark, ended with:
Jesus proclaimed the nearness and the imminence of the kingdom of God. Jesus told his disciples that they would enlist others. Jesus drove out unclean spirits and healed the sick.
2:1-3:12) This is series of episodes remarkable for a set of conceptual gradations. The four men lower the paralytic through the roof, and rather than bestow forgiveness on the paralytic as an act of unmerited grace, or to bestow forgiveness on the paralytic in response to the man's faith, it is said of Jesus that he forgives the paralytic when "Jesus saw their faith."
Jesus responds then to what he knows the scribes are thinking: "Why doth this man thus speak blasphemies? who can forgive sins but God only?" Jesus responds in his fashion of presenting logically unanswerable quandaries: "Whether it is easier to say to the sick of the palsy, Thy sins be forgiven thee; or to say, Arise, and take up thy bed, and walk?"
Jesus then works the healing with the preface, "But that ye may know that the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins . . . " Jesus uses the enigmatic phrase "Son of man," coupled with the curious reference to the Son of man having power "on earth" to forgive sins--a strange way indeed for Jesus to speak of himself (as the denominations would have it) as the one and only divine Son of God, who would of course have the power to forgive sins always and everywhere. The episode ends with the crowd praising God for what they have seen, not praising Jesus as divine or as the single holder of the honorific "Son of man."
Later, the episode of the disciples picking corn on the Sabbath ends with Jesus saying, "The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath: Therefore the Son of man is Lord also of the sabbath." If the phrase "Son of man" was intended to be limited to the divine Jesus, co-equal with God (as the standard notion goes), Jesus would be merely making the Pharisees' point for them: that the disciples were violating a realm notable in that here the divine "Son of man" as Lord and God had put down a law of time immemorial.
This set of episodes ends with Jesus healing in a great crowd, and with the unclean spirits loudly proclaiming "Thou art the Son of God"--an exclamation that in its renditions (despite its assignment of full recognition of deity by the churches) is not without a problematic quality, being--along with "messiah"--at times applied to obviously human persons. More importantly to our present discussion, the unclean spirits are told by Jesus not to reveal his identity abroad--which would be a nonsensical notion in the midst of the crowd unless, as I have contended before, the cries of the unclean spirits are only heard or understood by Jesus.
To this point in the Gospel of Mark, neither the divine quality nor the messianic stature of Jesus is known to humanity, and this is of great importance if we are to assess properly Jesus' use of "Son of man." Moreover, the phenomenon of forgiveness of sins has already been infused with a radical and unsettling set of elements: that forgiveness might be obtained on behalf of another, and that forgiveness might be--at least in part--bestowed by persons upon each other. The entire topic of "forgiveness of sins" (when understood to involve eternal consequences under God) is one of the most perplexing in the ministry of Jesus. Jesus taught that his disciples participate communally in the soliciting and the bestowal of eternal forgiveness.
Jesus proclaimed the nearness and the imminence of the kingdom of God. Jesus told his disciples that they would enlist others. Jesus drove out unclean spirits and healed the sick. Jesus taught that his disciples participate communally in the soliciting and the bestowal of eternal forgiveness.
This gets us through Chapter Three, verse 12.
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