Some Good Friday reflections:
“This, then, is not a resume of advancement, but of downward movement… these two acts of incarnation and death are actually part of a larger story.” (Michael Gorman)
“What is interrupted- in this case, the old age- does not cease to exist. At the same time, however, what is interrupted does not continue as if nothing had happened… The cross interrupts or invades the old age- the old myths and conventions and rationalities of the world. The cross unmasks the powers of this age for what they are; not the divine regents of life, but the agents of domination, violence and death. The cross inaugurates the new age or new creation in the midst of the old. And through this interruption of the old age by the new, the cross creates a space where believers may be liberated from the powers of this age both to resist their deadly ways and to begin living in the new creation.” (C Campbell)
“Here we encounter an apostolic witness to the reality and consequences of Christ’s odd triumph, whose relevance is found precisely in its irrelevance, it’s willingness to stand in the tension with some of our contemporary sensibilities… Death is here an instrument of the Savior’s proper work, something by means of which salvation is worked out… But at the same time, Death is also an instrument of the (Power’s) proper work, something by whose power women and men are held in fearful captivity. In the first case, Christ takes death upon himself for the sake of (the whole); in the second, the devil threatens and inflicts death upon (the very thing) Christ comes to save. Human life itself- “flesh and blood”- stands in the midst of this deadly contest over who controls death…. In this frame of reference, Death is anything but natural for it has been weaponized, as it were, within the disorder of the cosmos (the Latin Vulgate’s the “empire of Death).” (Philip Ziegler)
“It is not death as such (non-existence) but rather the vision of Death (the Powers, or the Empire) as divine judgment upon sin- death fundamentally repurposed and dentatured by sin- that terrifies… The Power of Death (the rule of Empire) as the future and final horizen of life reaches back into life itself to torment, alarm, oppress, and so to enslave.” (Ziegler)
“In some ways, and paradoxically, the casting off of the useless weight of the armour (by Frodo in the Lord of the Rings) is itself a kind of stripping for battle. Tolkien would have been familiar with the lines from the Anglo-Saxon poem “The Dream of the Rood” in which the Passion is narrated by the cross itself, and the cross sees this stripping of Jesus not as an opposed humiliation but as a heroic preparation.” (Guite Golding)
I’m nearing the end of my journey through the book of Mark, the Gospel we have been reading with my Church body since Advent, and the Gospel I have been studying through at home alongside that. I have noted this in earlier reflections and posts, but one of my biggest take aways from my time with this Gospel is this notion of Mark’s narrative concern having three distinct parallel lines.
The first is telling the story the story of Israel. The second is telling the story of Jesus. The third, which is perhaps the one most neglected in common discourse and readings, is the fact that the author is writing this Gospel to a new creation community and telling their story.
As I noted previously, it’s original audience, and likewise those of us approaching it today as we endeavor to unpack that context, understood that these three parallel lines ran together, interweaving with one another through it’s interest in this singular and important question- what difference did the death and resurrection of Jesus bring about in their world.
To ask that in different terms- how does the world look different given the reality of the death and resurrection (and ascension) of Jesus.
What gets illuminated by taking these parallel lines together is the fact that, as these initial readers were reading the Gospel according to Mark they were also understanding this not simply to tell Israel’s story, nor only to be telling Jesus’ story, but to also be telling their story in light of this inquageration of a new creation reality. Readers would pick up on the narrative consruction, understanding the ways in which “the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the son of God,” (1:1) is in fact the beginning of their own story “in Christ.” At an editorial level, “their” own context is woven in to Mark’s Gospel all the way through, with language and references hyperlinking back to their own story as a community of people going through their own version of genesis, exodus, exile and liberation.
What informs the Gospel writer’s conviction however is in fact that this “version” of this familiar story is being told within the timeline (to use a crude word) of this inaugerated new creation reality.
It remains abundantly clear, this isn’t invention. This is conviction. And this conviction pours out into this central idea for Mark that they, and by natural conclusion for us occupying this new creation reality on the other side of Jesus’ death and resurrection in this same timeline, we are all living this same story. In the framework of the Gospel, telling this story becomes an invitation to see it in the very same apocalpytic imagination that this second temple Judean context would have been steeped in- a revealing of where we are in this story, and, in the Christian narrative, to both find in Jesus the promised inaugeration of the new creation and, as Mark begins with the prophet isaiah, locating the image of Christ as being present in the entirety of the cosmic and historical story of Israel. To borrow from the citation above, “What is interrupted- in this case, the old age- does not cease to exist. At the same time, however, what is interrupted does not continue as if nothing had happened…”
This is the central concern and tension behind the questions pervading this Gospel’s original audience, set as they are against the shadows of Rome. These are the same questions we ask today in our own contexts.
For me, one of the great challenges I have long wrestled with as someone who embodies and occupies space in the particular framework that is the larger western enterprise, with it’s own visions of Empire, is this way in which this necessary question has been seemingly buried by our shifting emphasis on to the empirically laden “is Jesus historically true” and “is the bible true” type of concerns. In the language of this enterprise and it’s Empire, the question that Jesus’ death and resurrection once posed to these early communities, soaked in the conviction that something did indeed happen, gets entirely rewritten, exchanged for apologetics and it’s counter-factions. In the process, something my 7 year old self was already picking up on and wrestling with and pushing back on all those years ago, the real dilemma of our conscious awareness of this existence becomes a kind of sacrificial lamb. Rather than recognizing the cosmic reality that our rational senses intuitively understand to be true within the framework of our lived lives (the world we observe AND experience), we give interpretive precedence to the human instituions of our age (the Empire and it’s sciences), as though they can lay claim to their own authoratative presence, and in the process we incorporate romanticized and reductionist redefinitions of Sin and Death based on what are at their core materialist presuppositions and the moral (constructed) systems that afford these presuppositions a kind of power and control over the cosmic reality we both share and embody. And by and large, I think it can be argued that western christianity came to incorporate this same language, recasting it as it becomes it’s own sort of institutional alignment with the enterprise and it’s new found myths.
In short- we have become experts at remaking the narrative in our own image, and at deceiving ourselves about the root of the problem- cosmic enslavement.
There is an addtional element to this as well, which has its own parallel lines being made evident within the Gospel according to Mark. That is how the author understands the role of “the Powers” which stand in stark resistance to the resurrection of Jesus. As a decidely and distinctly Jewish conception, situated within the language of second temple Judaism, the Powers were seen to be synonymous with the terms Sin and Death, and these terms could (and would) flow interchangeably between the three central uses of these terms- a cosmic ruler, an enslaved state, and the distinct participation in this state or in allegiance to this ruler. As such, much scholarly work over the last 20 years has been recovering this partiuclar understanding of this language, lost as it’s become within the lengthy movement of a western, evangelical rhetorical reconstituting of what, as I am arguing here, is in fact a far more robust picture of sin than the “moral failure” distinctions made common today. This is something we also see made abundantly clear in the Gospel according to Mark. Ancient readers, standing in that long Tradition concerning the story of Israel, were equally adept at applying the “Powers” to the earthly ruling Empires. Leaders are made synonymous with the “seed of the serpent,” and the Empires are made synonyous with the cosmic Powers that enslave the whole of creation. This ability to move between the comsic and the particular is paramount for undersetnading the story that is being told, and for understanding how it is being told (and indeed, the story of the early community it is being told to).
At it’s heart, understanding this cosmic story matters because it is what allows us to frame the realities of both Empire and our own questions of participation within it in the light of a narrative which makes sense of the lived life- our observation and experience of this world shaped by a historical imagination. Here, Sin and Death are not reducible, as they become in western appeals to forms of secular materialism, to “non-existance” and our moral constructs, both definitions which the above enterprise has intellectualized into forms of primary and governing “truths.” Rather, Sin and Death, taken within the Gospel narrative and the world that is informing it, is a systemic reality that this enterprise does not and cannot address. In fact, it effectively opposes it. It gives us actual language to name Death, and thus subsequently to name Life, and to make sense of that within the paramaters of our human observation and experience of this world. What has seduced modern, western Christianity, in line with the enterprise itself, is strikingly and startling, a romanticizing of Death. The problem with this of course is, Death is not reducible to non-existence. The language of Death speaks to the very qualities of our participation in in the world. To set this within the interests of logic, reason and a proper appeal to rationalism, the “world” our narrative is handing us needs to make sense of the world we observe and experience. And such a world must attend for the kind of reality we live in relationship to.
Put in other terms- it must make sense of the way life itself functions. That means we need a story that can qualify it and define it as something distinctly different from death. This is the inference of the citations above.
No amount of building of such human, constructed moral systems can free us from an enslaved reality to the Powers of Sin and Death. And yet, as I think the Gospel according to Mark is trying to argue, we continue to tell ourselves that it can. Growing up in the world of western, evangelical chrsistianity, I was long taught to think in such terms. In my circles, the problem was my moral failure (sin), and the solution was God’s satisfying a necessary payment of death. Thus, salvation, or it’s active component, atonement, was all about how we (or more accurately, I) build our lives (or in the more reformed version, how God builds our lives) in a way that accords with what becomes a Gospel of Jesus’ “moral accomplishment.” Meaning, Jesus reflects the moral perfection we were meant to but failed to attain ourselves, thus making Jesus’ sacrifice effectual because of that perfection and leading us to, in some way shape or form, give our allegiance to these moral constructs and the social/societal constructs that hand them to us on political grounds, an elevated position of authority. The problem with this narrative is not just the obvious abuses this make available to such allegiances to the Powers (regardless of political allegiances), but about how it misses the story of salvation altogether. The former is about the world we seek to control by way of Death. The latter is about the world that needs liberating according to LIfe.
It misses the movement that the story represents, between these two realities defined by different rules.
It misses the ways in which the sin of participation is inately clarified by the thing (the cosmic rule or enslavement) it is participating in.
It misses the way in which the Gospel writers, including Mark, along with the world these Gospels emerged within (including Paul), understood terms like atonement and salvation, terms that, if we are to answer the question of our own participation in the new reality it brings about, must begin with the cosmic narrative, the cosmic concern. Here, the victory is not, as the citation suggests above, the Death which has been de-natured, but the Resurrection and ascension- the inagueration of a new reality. As a book I’ve been slow-reading over the past while puts astutely, Union with the Resurrected Christ: Eschatological New Creation and New Testament Theology (G.K. Beale), for the ancients this eschatological reality was inherent in this story from the beginning. It is what allows the ancients to think in terms of past, present, future all at once. Thus we have misundertood the apocalyptic language and phrasings to think only in terms of an ending. Jesus, breaking into the middle of history as He does, complicates this way of thinking, precisely because it forces us to ask the perennial question, what changed. How are things different. Here, the emphasis of modern theologies on the death of Jesus as the atoning sacrifice consistently confuses the what and the how, precisely because it’s trying to answer it outside of the temple imagery this language is trying to evoke.
I think this confusion is more self evident than many want to recognize. Rather than engage that question, it becomes far easier to simply edge it into the background of our tightly guarded and cleverly constucted theologies. We ignore the fact that this is also what the whole enlightenment project does with its own percieved stumbling blocks. The stuff that challenges the tightly guarded commitments of the myth of progress gets swept under the rug where it doesn’t have to be attended for.
In both cases, and in its own way, the thing being swept out of mind and sight is in fact Death itself. In the case of the western enterprise, the stuff of Death takes on the language of Life. In the case of the Christian narrative, our efforts to define atonement in terms of the “death” of Christ leads us to miss the very grounds upon which the writers and the cultures and communities in the ANE make sense of the new reality Christ brings about- the resurrection and ascension. For them, the sacrificial language is not rooted in death (in fact, death is precisely the thing it wants to reconstitute as resurrected life, in practice, a concept rooted in this movement between two spaces or two realities). What make the person and ministry of Jesus a saving work, a saving work that indeed brings about atonement, is His effectual defeat of the Powers of Sin and Death. It is the fact that Jesus brings about the inaugeration of a new reality as part of that familiar and entrenched eschatological way of life and thought.
This, for me, is the true power of that narrative, and why I think it encompasses a true form of hope. In naming these two realities, it hands us a way to name Death. And in naming Death, it hands us a way to name Life. Not as a future reality, but as a qualitative one that we experience in the here and now.
As I’ve been reading through the Lenten devotional, Wardrobes and Rings: Through Lenten Lands with the Inklings by Guite Golding, I’ve been struck by this unique group of individuals whom I think got this in a way very few have. Standing in this liminal space, between the modernists and the romantics, they had this sense that something was off, and they used story to attempt to communicate and flesh this intuition out. as they wrote and discussed and debated together. At it’s heart was their deep understanding regarding the importance of the story itself. More than this though, woven into the fabric of all of their narratives is this sense that our myths must, and need, to attend honestly for both Death and Life. Apart from this, and indeed, for them they would also say apart from Christ, we are only left with the echos of our great deceptions.
As my commentary on the Gospel according to Mark notes, “When Jesus dies, rejected and alone, the most significant event of the Gospel transpires; the temple curtain is torn in two…” Thus, it becomes clear, is the resonant sound of God’s presence, residing as it did in the temple (the temple itsself being a microcosm of the garden space within it’s liturgical expression) now abiding in the whole of creation. This becomes the central movement of God in Christ. Death is reconstituted as Life, or more accurately put, in the defeat of the Powers of Sin and Death, that which Death holds in its grip has been reconstituted as Life. Meannig, it, even creation itself, becomes a qualitatively different thing. The question is, do we have the language to recognize what this is, and do we have a narrative that can justify our hope that this, this basic and evident dynamic of our observation and experience of the world we occupy, has in fact has been made true in our midst.
The Stories of my Life 