Lectionary Reflection: Lent 4 - 2013

The Lectionary Readings for the Fourth Sunday in Lent:

Joshua 5:9-12; Psalm 32; 2 Corinthians 5:16-21; Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

Again, my reflection comes from Ched Myers' Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark's Story of Jesus (20th Anniversary Edition) Orbis Books, 1988, 2008.

Again, I know that we are in the midst of Year B (which has Luke as the dominate Gospel text), but I think that Myers' reading of Mark's Gospel might shed some light on - or at least conversation with - Luke's account. Where possible, I will be referring to the parallel Markan accounts of Luke's passages.

There is no parallel for Luke's parable of the "Prodigal Son" within any of the other gospels. This parable remains a Lukan masterpiece.

That said, I thought it would be helpful to look at Mark's parable of the "Strong Man." Myers insists that this parable shed's light on the mission of Jesus as Mark sees it, and the title of Myers' book is taken from this parable.

In Mark 3:1-6,  Jesus heals a man with a withered hand, doing so on the Sabbath, at the synagogue, in full-view of the "they" who had come to catch Jesus out. After a bit of a confrontation, and the healing, Jesus leaves, and the Pharisees and Herodians plot how to destroy Jesus. This plot element stays throughout Mark's Gospel - at times in the background, at times in the forefront.

In Mark 3:7-12 Jesus and the disciples go to the Sea of Galilee where the crowd presses in and Jesus cures many. Jesus then goes up a mountain and calls the leadership (twelve disciples representing the twelve tribes of Israel) to start a "new confederacy" (Mark 3:13-19a).

v. 19b finds Jesus and the disciples going home, where the crowd again presses in on them, "so that they could not even eat." It is here that his family shows up saying "He's gone out of his mind" and the scribes claim he has Beelzebul, which leads to Jesus parable about the strong man's house. Following this parable, we are again told that his family is outside, and Jesus' gives a new definition of family. The "family concerns" become the bread of the "Beelzebul" sandwich, as it were.

As you read Myers comments (below) think about how we unconsciously participate in keeping the Strong Man's House ruling over ourselves? How are we participating in resisting the "Strong Man"? Who might the "Strong Man" be in our day and age?

Blessed Be

Joel

From Myers:

Jesus has formed his "confederacy," and the scribes are commencing their "counterinsurgency," leading with the charge that Jesus is himself possessed (3:22). I. Lewis's anthropological study of demon possession in traditional societies notes that it is common for those in power to impugn exorcists who assume "a positive, active, and above all, militant role":

Witchcraft accusations represent a distancing strategy which seeks to discredit, sever, and deny links. ... These upstart controllers of spirits are, by their power over the spirits, suspected of causing what they cure [Hollenbach, 1981:577].

To put it in terms of the political war of myths, when the ruling class feels its hegemony threatened, it tries to neutralize challengers by identifying them with the mythic cultural arch-demon. The logic of the scribes was simple: because they believed themselves to be God's representatives, Jesus' "secession" necessarily put him in allegiance to Satan. To borrow from the symbolic canon of our modern cold war dualism, Jesus is being labeled a "communist."

The scribes use a double euphemism for Satan. The first is "Beelzebul," an obscure name probably derived from a Hebrew idiom connoting " 'height,' 'abode,' 'dwelling' ... the name means 'Lord of the dwelling,' with reference either to the air or to the possessed in whom he dwells' (Taylor, 1963:239); cf. Mt 10:25). The second is "prince of the demons" (en to archonti ton daimonion), echoing the "principalities and powers" language found throughout the New Testament (e.g., 1 Cor 2:6; Eph 2:2). The semantic field is obviously that of apocalyptic, and the discourse is therefore specifically political:

We may understand that kingdom of Satan as a symbolic accentuation of the negative experiences of earthly rule. According to the apocalypse of the shepherds is Ethiopic Enoch 85-90, when Israel lost its political independence, God relegated rule over it to the fallen angels, the subjects of Satan. The mythological events here reflect political ones [Theissen, 1977:76].

Here the apocalyptic combat myth deepens significantly. From the wilderness (1:12f.) the struggle has moved steadily into the heart of the political geography of Roman Palestine, first in the synagogue exorcism and then in the Human One's challenge to the symbolic order (2:10, 28). Now Jesus goes nose to nose with his opponents in the war of myths.

By introducing the discourse of parables at this point (3:23), Mark is preparing us for the first sermon (4:3ff.), which must also be understood in an apocalyptic context. Conversely, the sermon's demand that we attend to parables with "ears to hear" (4:9) applies here: Jesus is about to articulate something that must not be missed, despite the fact that it is somewhat cryptic. Demonstrating a style of verbal riposte that he will pursue masterfully in his later temple debates (11:27ff.), Jesus' defense becomes offense by turning his antagonists' words back upon them as a question and a riddle:

"How can Satan exorcise (eskballein) Satan?

Should a kingdom be divided against itself,

that kingdom cannot stand;

Should a house be divided against itself,

that house cannot stand;

Thus if Satan has revolted against himself and is divided,

he cannot stand and is coming to an end" [3:23-26]

The intricate parallelism and cross-referencing of images in this series of rhetorical statements is clear, but what does it mean?

The famous hermeneutics of Abraham Lincoln notwithstanding, these are not placative platitudes about civil war weakening the body politic, as if Jesus seeks to assure the scribes that he is really their ally against a common enemy, Satan. No, Jesus is short-circuiting their self-serving ideological dualism by unmasking its contradictions and collapsing it in upon itself:

Encountering the [structure of] presuppositions of the opponents ... requires the awakening of a counter-vision with sufficient imaginative force to crack the hard shell of this structure. This is what these words attempt through their surprising adoption of the perspective of the accusation. ... It wishes to drive a wedge deeply into the foundations on which the opponents have built their world" [Tannehill, 1975:179, 184].

The carefully chosen images of the domain of "Satan" (3:23, 26) bear remarkable correspondence to the ideological foundations of scribal Judaism: the centralized politics of the Davidic state ("kingdom," 3:24) and its symbolic center, the temple ("house," 3:25). That these foundations are in crisis and "cannot stand" will be articulated later in this story, when Jesus battle these scribal opponents on their home turf in Jerusalem. There Jesus will refuse to identify his "kingdom" with David's (12:35ff.; below ...). When he finally encounters the temple itself, he will "exorcise" (ekballein) those who have "divided" the purpose of the "house of prayer" (11:15-7). Then, in his second sermon, Jesus will prophesy that the temple-state will not be able to stand (13:2), and the true "Lord of the house" will come and reclaim his domain (13:35).

This much of the riddle is solved: Satan cannot "clean out his own house" (3:23); it is up to Jesus to lead the "revolt" against the powers, to bring their rule to an end (3:26). It is Jesus' declaration of ideological war with the scribal establishment. Having laid his opponents bare, Jesus then drops his semantic jousting and spins a thinly veiled political parable in which he likens his mission to criminal breaking and entering:

"No one can enter a strong man's house and plunder his goods (ta skeue) unless the strong man is first bound (dese); then indeed his house may be plundered" [3:27]

This introduces two more important proleptic references. "Goods" refers to "utensils of various materials ... which were employed for the most varied purposes in home and field, in war and peace, in the secular world and the sacred" (Maurer, TDNT, 8:360). The only other appearance of the term in Mark occurs in 11:16 - in reference to the vessels of the temple cult on which Jesus puts a ban! "Binding" appears in another exorcism context - referring to a "demon" whom no one had the "strength" to bind (5:3f.)! It also describes the political imprisonment of John (6:17), Jesus (15:1), and Barabbas (15:7). In other words, the parable illumines the later narrative, and vice versa.

Mark has come clean: Jesus (a.k.a. the "stronger one" heralded by John, 1:8) intends to overthrow the reign of the strong man (a.k.a. the scribal establishment represented by the demon of 1:24). In this parable the oracle of Second Isaiah lives again: Yahweh is making good on the promise to liberate the 'prey of the strong (LXX, ischuontos) and rescue the captives of the tyrants" (Is 49:24f.). Imperial hermeneutics, ever on the side of law and order, will of course find this interpretation of the strong man parable strained, offensive, shocking. Yet Mark drew the image of breaking and entering from the most enduring of the primitive Christian eschatological traditions: the Lord's advent as a thief in the night (Mt. 24:43 par; 1 Thes 5:2, 4; 1 Pt 3:10; Rv 3:3, 16:15).

As if to underscore the seriousness of what he has just said, Jesus concludes with a solemn "Amen" saying (3:28). He now deals the final blow to the debt code: blanket pardon. But there is one exception: mistaking the work of the Holy Spirit for that of Satan. As Juan Lusi Segundo puts it:

The blasphemy resulting from bad apologetics will always be pardonable. ... What is not pardonable is using theology to turn real human liberation into something odious. The real sin against the Holy Spirit is refusing to recognize, with "theological" joy, some concrete liberation that is taking place before one's very eyes" [1979:254]

This is what the scribal class cannot "see." Thus by the close of his defense, Jesus had turned the tables completely upon his opponents: it is they who are aligned against God's purposes. To be captive to the way things are, to resist criticism and change, to brutally suppress efforts at humanization - is to be bypassed by the grace of God [BtSM, 164-7].