Mark's Gospel 4: Counter-culture Jesus – Aldred H. Neufeldt – May 16, 2010

Introduction

Both last Sunday and today we have been and are blessed by the addition new members to our community of faith.  It’s a blessing in a number of ways.  Most immediately, there is the simple joy of celebrating the joining itself – whether by transfer and confession of faith or by baptism.  Then there is the blessing of coming to know new people – both for those who have been here for a while and for those joining.  More distally, there is the blessing that comes from the ways in which our congregational culture will be enriched.  Each person brings her or his own unique cultural heritage to join the mix that already is here. Pastor Marilyn referred to such enrichment in the introductory remarks to her sermon last Sunday.

Our cultures, both individually and collectively, are not to be taken lightly – indeed, we should take them very seriously because they explain so much about who and what we are.  I’m not talking about the obvious manifestations of culture – the differences in language, or foods, or family traditions. Important as they are, it is the deeper invisible aspects of culture that are really important – that part of our culture which most of us are not even aware of, but which act like a filter through which we see and understand the world.  We become aware of our deeply personal cultural assumptions only in those rare moments when we step out of our familiar surroundings – like a fish that is unable to understand the concept of water until it is out of the pond.  

Most everyone here will have had such an experience – perhaps the first time you came face to face with different ways of thinking about what it means to be on time, or different attitudes about cleanliness, or different ways of thinking about honesty and fair play. Was your first response one of frustration, thinking “why can’t they do it the way I’m used to?”  Or of bemused tolerance, thinking “it may work for them, but it’s not for me?”  Or, of curiosity, thinking “hmmm…. interesting…. maybe there is something I can learn from that?” Such aspects of culture are deeply ingrained, absorbed into our very beings, and difficult to change.  I should know.  I married a woman who learned from her father that to be on time meant one should be there 10 minutes early – to me, 10 minutes late was fine.  By the grace of God, and considerable tolerance, our marriage has survived 47 years despite periodic tensions over our different assumptions about time.

It is this question of culture that is at the heart of my sermon today – not the silly part about time – but the deeper and more important part of culture, gained early in life – in particular, the cultural context within which Jesus grew up and how that is reflected in his ministry.

The Culture and Politics of Jesus’ Day
Earlier sermons in this series on Mark’s Gospel have made several important points I want to build on.  One was that Mark’s Gospel emphasizes the teachings of Jesus as ‘the way’ to the kingdom of God.  A second is that the Gospel inexorably pulls one to Jerusalem, and Jesus’ confrontation with the powers there.  A third is that his disciples found it difficult to understand, to see, the meaning of Jesus’ teachings until after his death and resurrection.  

1. The Two Processions on Palm Sunday.  Let me begin with that final week of Jesus in Jerusalem.  Two processions entered Jerusalem on a spring day in the year 30.  (1) It was the beginning of the week of Passover, the most sacred week of the Jewish year.  One was a peasant procession – the other an imperial procession.  

From the east came Jesus, riding a donkey down the Mount of Olives, cheered by his followers with shouts of Hosanna, leafy branches on the road, entering Jerusalem through the Sheep gate near the temple.  Jesus came from the peasant village of Nazareth, and most of his followers were peasants.  Jesus and some of those followers had journeyed from Galilee, about 100 miles to the north, and now arrived in Jerusalem.

On the opposite side of the city, from the west, came Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Idumea, Judea and Samaria, at the head of a column of imperial cavalry and foot soldiers, trumpets announcing their approach to the west gates and the fortress Antonia overlooking the temple. Pilate and his troops came from ‘Caesarea on the Sea,’ about 60 miles to the west, where Roman governors of the time lived.

Jesus would have known about Pilate’s procession, as would all Jews, for it was the standard practice of Roman governors of Judea to be in Jerusalem for major Jewish festivals.  They did so, not out of empathy or reverence for the religious devotion of their Jewish subjects, but to be in the city in case there was trouble.  They had cause for concern.  It was not uncommon, especially at Passover, to have a festival celebrating the liberation of Jewish people from an earlier empire.  So, it wasn’t just happenstance that Jesus rode a donkey colt into Jerusalem.  As Mark tells it (11: 1 – 11), the story of Jesus entering Jerusalem seems to be a prearranged counter-procession – planned in advance to contrast with the symbolism of Pilate’s procession. Pilot’s train of soldiers embodied the power, glory and violence of the empire that ruled the world. The Jesus procession recalled imagery from the Jewish Bible and symbolized an alternate vision to earthly kingdoms, the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God – the power of empire!

This Palm Sunday ride was not just about the earthly power and Roman gods Pilate represented – it was as much to challenge the way in which the temple had been corrupted into an arm of Rome’s presence.  The Jewish temple leaders were full collaborators with Rome.  From the time of Julius Caesar and before, Rome’s approach to occupation was to make a deal with local leaders – they could keep their positions of power so long as they collected Rome’s imperial taxes, and kept the peace to Rome’s liking.  In Judea at the time of Jesus these were the temple authorities that Mark speaks of as ‘the chief priests, the elders, and the scribes’ (e.g. 14:53).   All owed their positions and wealth to Rome.  Rome kept the priestly class off balance by appointing the high priest of the temple at its will. So, the high priest and temple authorities walked a fine line between collaborating enough with Rome to keep Rome happy, but
not so much as to anger their Jewish subjects. Moreover, the wealth of both the priestly class and lay wealthy came from the work of the ordinary people – the peasants, some 90% of the total population, the agricultural laborers, and fisher folk, and artisans of an agrarian society living in hamlets, villages and small towns, who were the producers of the wealth that was taxed or otherwise taken by the wealthy and their retainers living in cities.  

So, it is to the peasants in particular that Jesus directs his message about the kingdom of God and “the way” – though it should be remembered there were individual scribes, Pharisees and other members of the council such as Joseph of Arimathea (15:43-46) who were followers – but these were in the minority.

2. The Cultural Back Story.  There is a cultural back-story to the Palm Sunday procession worth exploring.  It has to do with what shaped Jesus, as well as his disciples. Over the past several decades quite a bit has been learned from literary and archeological sources about what life was like for a growing boy in a small rural village like Nazareth. One Franciscan scholar in Jerusalem puts it this way: (2)

All Jewish boys learned to read and write in their own family. The only known book was the (Jewish) Bible. Parchments were very expensive. Dressed in his “tallit” (prayer shawl with fringes), the child learned the history of his own people by hearing commentaries on the texts proclaimed each Shabbat in the synagogue. He gradually assimilated the history of Israel; the election, the promises, the covenant, the gift of the land, the law. He learned how to sing the psalms, in particular the “Hallel”. Two times a day, he recited the “Shema Israel” and the prayer of “Shemone Esre”. He wore “phylacteries” and did not shave the hair of his temples, as prescribed in the Bible.

At the age of twelve, Jesus went down to the Temple of Jerusalem to make his “bar mitswa”, to become a “son of the commandment” like all young Jewish boys. He talked with the teachers who marveled at his wisdom. He discovered the Temple with its priests, its merchants, and its brightly colored and boisterous crowd. To His parents who searched for Him, He answered that He had to be about His Father’s affairs. He already had a deep awareness of his relationship with God whom He called His Father.

Returning to Nazareth, Jesus was subject to Mary and Joseph, and ever close to the ordinariness of life. He was not an idle dreamer. Later, in his teaching, he compared the Reign of God to a lamp which gave light to the entire house, or to yeast which a woman took and kneaded into three measures of flour, and which made all the dough rise, or still better, of seed sown in the earth which grew up irresistibly, whether man was awake or asleep.

Whether or not this account is exactly correct, it is evident from Jesus’ teaching that the memories of his childhood were never far off. The images he used – the lilies of the fields, the birds that ate the grain on the road, the widow who demanded justice and that of the unjust judge – reveals a deep religious sensitivity to ordinary life.

At the same time, he was sensitive to the political and religious context of his time. Even in early life his horizons would have expanded beyond Nazareth and even Galilee.  Sepphoris, the Capital of Galilee, was not more than a few kilometers from the village of his childhood.  Even if he never went there, Jesus would have heard about the Roman town, with its own theater, villas and banks – a new culture, occupied by strangers, very close at hand. “Why were the Romans in the land promised to our fathers?” is a question he must have heard many a time.  

He also would have heard stories about the high priests in Jerusalem, about how the temple was to be the dwelling place of God and the mediator of forgiveness through sacrifice; and, how it now collected not only the tithes for the temple, but also the imperial tax for Rome.  All this must have been the cause for gossip and unhappiness amongst the adults he knew.

The Counter Culture Jesus
Such was the context in which the Jesus and his disciples grew up – and in which Jesus formulated his counter-cultural vision of the kingdom of God and ‘the way’ to the kingdom. From the beginning of Mark’s Gospel we hear the words “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is near” (1:15).  The phrase ‘kingdom of God’ was a political as well as religious metaphor.  To his listeners it would have suggested a kingdom very different from the kingdoms they knew, very different from the domination they experienced from Jerusalem.

According to Mark, Jesus’ message and activity immediately involves him in conflict with authorities.  The scripture text I chose for today provides one small illustration.   John’s disciples and the Pharisees were fasting, Jesus and his disciples were not.  Jewish Law required only one fast, on the Day of Atonement, though Pharisees adopted a more rigorous regimen, fasting twice a week and on days commemorating certain historical events.   Whatever the reason for their fast, Jesus responds to the Pharisees by saying: “who fasts at a wedding?”  Everyone knew a wedding celebration normally lasted 7 days – and, one fasts only when the wedding is over.  

The passage then continues with two well known pieces of homey wisdom – “no one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment; if he does, the patch tears away from it, the new from the old, and a worse tear is made. And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; if he does, the wine will burst the skin, and the wine is lost, and so are his skins; but the new wine is for fresh skins.” (v. 21-22).  The message to the Pharisees is that there is a need for reform, and reform won’t come from those in power – the ‘old wineskins’, the ‘old garment’.  There is a new wine being fermented, and it will need new wineskins that can expand under pressure until the wine matures.

Both here and in subsequent passages throughout Mark’s Gospel, Jesus consistently sides with people on the fringe of the established order – the peasants. His ministry in Galilee, and on the outskirts of the more glamorous and beautiful city of Jerusalem, included healing lepers, touching blind people, eating with the poor and the sick, allowing those with no social status to come eat at the table. He ministered to prostitutes, to aliens, to widows, to foreigners. He condemned the domination system for its abuse and the oppression of those without power. Pursuit of economic and political gain in the middle of such rampant oppression, Jesu
s argues, is an affront to the nature of God’s kingdom.  Power, Jesus demonstrates, comes through powerlessness. If you want to be the greatest of all, you must become the least of all.

To be clear, the conflict Jesus had was not about priests or about wealth as such.  There are accounts of encounters with people of wealth or the priestly class that are positive.  Rather, Jesus’ protest was against a domination system, which the temple leaders sought to legitimate in the name of God. And, his counter-cultural message and approach brought him face-to-face with that dominant power system.

Concluding Thoughts

That brings us back to the beginning.  As we, individually, search how to be faithful to the Jesus vision, we might remember that two processions entered Jerusalem on that day in the year 30.  The same question, the same alternatives face us today as then.  Will we be people who are most shaped by our affluence, our wealth and class position, or by our identity as followers of Christ?  Which procession are we in?  Which one do we want to be in?  

Collectively, we do take a stance.  In TUMC we emphasize living together peacefully and simply as we continue the work of Jesus. We do not pursue relevance. We do not pursue glitz. Though we’re not always successful, we seek to carry out the practices of Jesus in our effort to live as a community of counter-culture.