A look at the gaps in the lectionary.
This week: the gap between
The text: Mark 3:7-19
I started this series several years ago for moments exactly like this one. The lectionary skips a bit of text that really fleshes out the story and gives important context. And just like last week, we miss out on the wider implication of Jesus’s ministry.
Jesus is ministering to the people and frustrating the leadership. Then, as we saw, he recasts our relationship to the Sabbath, as many had gotten too focused on the rules and not on the purpose.
Recognizing what Jesus is teaching is essential, and the lectionary treats it as such. But for us, to see why Jesus needed to teach that then helps us better understand our own problems with purpose.
We also benefit from seeing that Jesus’s ministry generated opposition from the beginning. And I don’t think we ought to dismiss it as “nobody can be loved by everybody”—the kind of easy take that lets us dismiss the whole line of thinking. No, Jesus was being critiqued by the leadership. And we need to take particular note of that because it is a constant in the text.
And what we’re seeing in chapters one and two sets up a genuine contrast here in chapter three. Jesus is insanely popular.
Essentially, Jesus is gettin a 99% Rotten Tomatoes score from the public and 20% from the critics. Which doesn’t happen. Not like this.
I worry that our attempts to skip past this part of the story mean that we miss something important.
The leaders were wrong.
This is the most obvious truth of the matter. And it is consistent throughout all of the gospels. The existing leadership was dead wrong about Jesus and what he was teaching. They were cowards and manipulators.
I think this also underserves our sense of the gospels by making us see all of the Pharisees as oppositional, when some like Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea ****weren’t. The truth is closer to a powerful majority. Or, as we see with fascism, it doesn’t take a majority, just enough fear to make the many think they can’t speak up.
We also set the Pharisees up like a bogeyman or an easy label for our own critics.
But the biggest harm from this pat approach to Jesus’s opposition is the antisemitism that labels the opponents of Jesus as all of the Jews (and Jesus as Christian).
These approaches to the leadership all come from lazy readings of scripture and avoiding the themes in it. Not talking about Jesus’s opponents makes them more powerful and likely to be distorted by the reader, not less.
And the leaders got Jesus so wrong because they feared him and what he was offering the people. They feared that he wasn’t orthodox enough and that others would be swayed by his teaching.
But this is also deeply contrasted with what we see in the first part of the Between text:
Jesus is insanely popular.
People are coming out of the woodwork and following him everywhere. For everything the leadership hates about him, the people love him.
And just like we often simplify the opposition, we simplify the support, too.
It can feel like we are on the right team (and against “their team). We can pick Jesus’s side against theirs. The binary of opposition too easily frames our thinking into two options. Even to the point that our standing outside of it requires our not picking “sides”—instead of realizing there are always more than two options…
There are easy corollaries between Jesus’s popularity and modern views of populism. And some of those are fruitful, too. But ultimately, insufficient.
Because the reality of Jesus’s popularity is that it is shallow and often built around self-serving ideas (which is where the real interesting stuff is).
Jesus needs space.
Literally. The most potent part of this story that we skip over is that Jesus needs to put literal space between himself and the crowds. Why? Because they are getting to be too much.
This moment should actually scare us.
I’m sure we can come up with our own images for the terror here. When we’ve been in crowds that just get too close. It reminds me of a mosh pit, where shoving is being thrown is part of the deal. Only, instead of pushing on purpose, it is grabbing and shoving to get to Jesus. Then, grabbing and shoving Jesus to get some of that magic.
The fact that Jesus keeps going is meaningful, if not too easy on our attempts to ignore the text. It makes Jesus seem like he can overcome the obstacles (which he can) rather than see the obstacles themselves for what they are.
It reminds me of the cheap grace we like to offer: a vision of forgiveness that doesn’t expect repentance—but to be a “good” person, we must preemptively forgive. Or, if we are actually being honest, we expect other people to preemptively forgive. We get to hold grudges because we’re sinners who need Jesus, right?
Jesus teaches the sweaty masses because they need it, not because he’s a good person who has to. But he separates himself from them—for everyone’s safety.
Then he appoints The Twelve.
After this, he appoints twelve of the disciples to go do stuff in his name. They are disciples and apostles. They are students and acolytes. Today we’d call this active learning. And it is the essential character of discipleship in the gospels (and for us).
The disciples continue to learn from Jesus. They also go out without Jesus and bring Jesus-work to people—they get to be Jesus for them.
I find this idea so alien to the modern church which wants a distant Jesus for us to worship or a easy framework of faith to follow. While we certainly hear of being “the hands and feet of Christ” from people of faith, particularly in charismatic circles, it rarely feels reflective of something so genuine as an active presence with people—something so natural as sitting and being—rather than a formal and authorized ministry with the ultimate goal of conversion.
Let’s not forget the demons!
Perhaps the most important supporting characters in Mark’s gospel are the demons. They alone know the power in the name of Jesus and recognize the threat to their own ambitions.
The demons contrast with the leadership who oppose Jesus out of their ignorance and the following crowds who support Jesus out of selfishness. The demons alone get the manner and scope of Jesus’s mission and what he means for the nature of the world.
Jesus’s command to silence them prevents their telling of the events, to skew things toward subversion. And it prevents people from seeing the whole picture before they’re ready.
Perhaps we, too, live with a limited view. Not because we are incapable, but because we must continue learning. After all, we are called to be disciples and apostles. To follow and practice.
And the bigger picture reminds us how narrow our vision can get. Of Jesus, ourselves, and each other.