This week I will focus on the Gospel reading of the lectionary, Mark 8: 31-38. While in the last reading, we saw the Gospel open with Jesus’ baptism and the beginning of his mission, the passage this week portrays Jesus’ role as a suffering servant, his death, and resurrection. Jesus uses the phrase “Son of Man” to describe himself: “Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering . . . and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside to rebuke him (31-32). The phrase “Son of Man,” or literally “human being,” has been called a reference to the angelic figure who appears in Daniel 7:13-14, representing the renewal of Israel:
I saw one like a human being
Coming with the clouds of heaven.
And he came to the Ancient One
And was presented before him.
To him was given dominion
And glory and kingship,
That all people, nations, and languages
Should serve him.
His dominion is an everlasting dominion
That shall not pass away,
And his kingship is one
That shall never be destroyed.
In Mark’s passage, Jesus goes on to say, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” This would have been an extremely graphic metaphor to Jesus’ audience of Jews living in Roman-occupied Caesarea Philippi. As demonstrated by the Passion story, but supported by historical evidence apart from the Bible, agitators in the Roman Empire who state officials deemed threatening were forced to carry the crossbeams on which they would then be hung for several days until suffocating to death.
One aspect of this Gospel reading that stands out is the way that the Jewish religious elite are portrayed. At this juncture of the scene, Jesus has just told the disciples that he is the Messiah (“anointed one”), the figure bringing about Israel’s renewal. Yet he will be a martyr-Messiah: not a ruler wielding political power, freeing Israel from Rome, and reinstating the Davidic line of kings. In addition he will not be recognized as the Messiah by the religious elite of his time: “rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed . . .” (31).
While preparing for this blog, I came across an editorial in Monday’s Boston Globe edition on the Vatican rejecting the “apology” from Richard Williamson. As the international press has widely reported, Williamson is a bishop of the breakaway Society of Pope Pius X whose excommunication was recently lifted by the Pope Benedict: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2009/03/02/a_bishops_bad_faith_apology/. Interviewed on Swedish television earlier this year, Williamson stated that “not one Jew was killed by gas chambers, it was all lies, lies, lies.” Although at the prompting of the Vatican, Williamson regretted causing harm, he did not go so far as to recant his denial of the Holocaust.
While this is an extreme example of a self-identified Christian leader making anti-Semitic statements, this narrative calls to mind the conflictual history between Judaism and Christianity. On one hand, parishes across the US have robust interfaith dialogue programs promoting mutual understanding. Paula Fredriksen, Professor of Ancient Christian at Boston University, writes of efforts of Catholic leaders to combat anti-Semitism: “. . . popes and bishops, in plenum councils, have issued official (‘magisterial’) teachings against it. Anti-Semitism violates magisterial instruction touching on biblical interpretation, on the theological significance of Christ’s sacrifice, and on Catholic-Jewish relations.” (1)
Yet as the Williamson story reminds us, tension between Jewish and Christian communities has not disappeared. Another national news story that recently thematized it involved the portrayal of Jewish people in Mel Gibson’s film The Passion. Amy-Jill Levine, professor at Vanderbilt Divinity School and author of prize-winning studies on Christian origins and the Gospel of Matthew, has described, for example, the unbiblical scene where construction of the cross on which Jesus died occurs in the Jewish Temple.
This brings us back to today’s reading. There is arguably not a passage in Mark suggesting that Jewish people as a whole bear responsibility for Jesus’ death. However, the syntax of this line does not imply that Jesus will be crucified for sedition in imperial Rome, but in connection with his rejection by Jewish leaders. His rejection and death are juxtaposed consequently in this sentence: “Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again” (31). Parishioners invested in promoting Jewish-Christian dialogue may likely wonder how this passage would sound to Jewish friends and colleagues.
In his book The Origins of Anti-Semitism, John Gager, Professor of Religion at Princeton University, describes a method of reading this passage not necessarily as a polemic against Jewish people, but as one scene among many in which all of Jesus’ contemporaries including his closest disciples fail to grasp his message. Describing the context of this passage, Gager writes how in Chapter 5, opposition to Jesus did not come from Jewish people but from an unclean demon; next Jesus grants the request of Jairus, “one of the rulers in the synagogue,” to heal his daughter (5:21-24, 35-43). Placing this passage in the context of Mark’s overall narrative structure, Gager writes,
. . . the theme of incomprehension is a leitmotif throughout Mark.
The most uncomprehending figures in the Gospel, and thus the
targets of Jesus’ most severe rebukes, are not outsiders at all but
rather the disciples themselves (Gager, 145).
8:33 supports this reading. In the kind of extreme rhetorical gesture we see Jesus often make in the Gospels, here Jesus is calling Peter, the eventual rock of the church, “Satan,” presumably when Peter does not accept that Jesus’ kingship is not of this world: “‘Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” Those who know the final outcome from the beginning are Christian readers of Mark’s Gospel, not the disciples in the Gospel itself. However Gager also directly admits that there are passages in the Gospels that portray Judaism negatively and have historically been interpreted to justify discrimination or worse, like Matthew 27:25. He explores how Gospel writers were likely motivated to define the early Christian movement as connected to and yet different from the vibrant and attractive Jewish community, and how this might have been a motivation for anti-Judaism polemic in the Gospels.
For readers interested in this topic I strongly recommend Amy-Jill Levine’s book The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus. A proponent of what Krister Stendhal calls “Holy Envy,” or appreciation of the beliefs and practices of another, Levine calls for in-depth examination of Jesus’s cultural context on the part of ministers and church leaders: as a Jew, speaking to Jews. The following quote encapsulates Levine’s project:
By seeing Jesus as a Jew with regard to both belief and practice,
Christians can develop a deeper appreciation for the teachings of
the church. . . / . . Today Jesus’ words are too familiar, too domesticated,
too stripped of their initial edginess and urgency. Only when heard
through first-century Jewish ears can their original edginess and urgency
be recovered. Consequently, to understand the man from Nazareth,
it is necessary to understand Judaism. . . . if we get Judaism wrong,
we’ll wind up perpetuating anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic teachings,
and thus the mission of the church—to spread a gospel of love rather
than a gospel of hate—will be undermined. For Christians, this concern
for historical setting should have theological import as well. If one
takes the incarnation—that is, the claim that the “Word became flesh
and lived among us” (John 1:14)—seriously, then one should take
seriously the time when, place where, and people among whom
this event occurred (Levine, 6-7).
Levine goes on to describe Jewish life in Jesus’s historical setting, including the roles of women, perceptions of the messiah, and diversity of practices and beliefs, with particular focus on the narratives of the Good Samaritan and the Samaritan Woman.
In the book of Romans, the apostle Paul presents a complex and at times contradictory picture of Jewish-Christian relations. Yet Romans 3, the chapter before this week’s lectionary reading passage, contains a vision of God extending salvation to Jewish people and Gentiles both: “. . . He will justify the circumcised on the ground of faith and the uncircumcised through that same faith. Do we then overthrow the law by this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law” (Romans 3:30-31.)
--Elizabeth Fels
(1) See http://jeffweintraub.blogspot.com/2003/07/gospel-according-to-mel-gibson-paula.html
Other works cited:
John G. Gager, The Origins of Anti-Semitism
Amy-Jill Levine, The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus
Bible quotes taken from The New Oxford Annotated Bible, third edition.
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