Jesus and His Bible, Part 7

(Note: I didn't like how I organized this originally, so I've reorganized it and added a bit.)

Jesus and his disciples went into Judea, which is closer to Jerusalem. There he met Pharisees who had a question they hoped would trap Jesus into revealing that he was not adhering to the Jewish law. This question about marriage and divorce is a big question for human relationships, and several inferences have been drawn from it that are in their turn legalistic and inhumane. This is the same Jesus who came not to condemn but to save, and who came to give abundant life, and who promised the Spirit of truth who would guide into truth, and that truth would set us free.

Specifically, Pharisees asked whether it lawful for a man to divorce a wife. Jesus met this with another question: “What did Moses command you?” 

The  marriage laws in Deuteronomy require some context. The Jewish Study Bible summarizes the cultural setting thus: “In the ancient Near East, marriage was a contractual relationship. A woman, regarded in terms of her relation to her father or her husband, could not act independently. There was little conception of the woman as a free agent, either in legal or sexual terms” (Deut. 22, 416, n.). Out of this context, the JSB editors see the Jewish law moving the woman toward agency and moral responsibility (p. 417, n. on verse 22). Jesus followed that direction right into equality, as we shall see.

The law quoted by the Pharisees comes out of Deuteronomy 24:1-4. “If a man takes a wife and she loses favor with him because he finds some indecency or uncleanness in her, he may write her a certificate of divorce and send her away.” This “indecency” could be something morally reprehensible, a physical defect, or lack of sexual satisfaction for the male (Alter, Moses, 698, n.).  Deuteronomy goes on: “If another man marries her, and he also turns against her and writes her a certificate of divorce or if he dies, the first husband absolutely must not take her back as his wife.”

The stipulation of a written certificate of divorce gives the woman a legal status permitting her to remarry. (This is an important distinction for her in a polygamous society.) Additionally, there is some evidence from the 5th century BCE that wives could initiate divorce. Exodus 21:10 specifies that a slave wife is entitled to food, clothing, and conjugal rights; withholding these sets her free from the marriage. Rabbis Suffice it to say that the legal context for marriage and divorce was complicated in Jesus’s time.

The Pharisees have bypassed the male-oriented commands about a husband who discovers his wife is either not a virgin when they marry or is unfaithful while married. In both cases, they can have her stoned to death. I speculate that whether or not the Pharisees were in agreement with the law, actually putting someone to death was tricky under Roman occupation. Another possibility is that stoning to death  for sexual sins had fallen out of favor. We know Joseph decided not to make a public spectacle out of Mary’s unexpected pregnancy, going on to marry her only when an angel said she was pregnant by the spirit of God. (Later, Pharisees would taunt Jesus by saying, “We know who our father is.” )

I cannot ignore Jesus’s teaching elsewhere that adultery takes place in the heart before it ever takes place in the bed. Underlying this teaching here in Mark is the understanding that wayward desire is common, and is no excuse for hardening one’s heart towards a spouse.

We have one account of what Jesus did when confronted with a stoning sentence for a woman taken in adultery. (See John 8.) He did not comment on stoning to death per se, but he did stipulate that only those without sin could throw stones, with the result that no one threw any. And Jesus himself, without sin, did not throw any either. 

The Thorny Question about Divorce, Installment 2

Jesus said that Moses allowed divorce because of “your hardness of heart. But from the beginning, God ‘made them male and female. For this cause a man shall leave his father and mother, and the two shall become one flesh.’ What therefore God has joined together, let no human separate” (Mark 10:6-9).

Jesus based his answer, not on the law, but on the creation narrative.  “And God created humanity in God’s own image; male and female, God created them” (Genesis 1:27). “In the day when God created humanity, God created them in the likeness of God, male and female, and God blessed them and named them Adam (Human) in the day when they were created” (Gen, 5:2). “For this cause a man shall leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Gen. 2:24). 

First, Jesus singles out for notice that God made humanity in God’s image, in the likeness of God, and that included maleness and femaleness. We can also see from other scripture as well that God exhibits both masculinity and femininity in God’s self , so it should not surprise us to see both in our own selves. So while some see this as confirming binary sexual divisions in humanity, it is also possible to see it as affirming that each person, bearing the image of God, includes masculinity and femininity as part of the whole self.  We ought not to try to separate ourselves from our own true identities; we ought to acknowledge and make use of our own interior diversity, as God does.

Second, the husband or the wife can file for divorce in Jesus’s hypothetical scenario. “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she herself divorces her husband and marries another man, she is committing adultery” (Mark 10: 11-12). This is a fundamentally egalitarian teaching. It applies not only to equality between men and women but within each individual equal respect for their masculine and feminine aspects. 

Second, he comments on what “one flesh” means, namely, a unity that cannot be broken by a certificate of divorce.  So he communicates a sense that there is a holy truth in the unity of the sexual act—a truth that goes beyond body to soul and spirit as well. The whole of the human being is involved with another human being. Try as we will, that unity cannot be undone, that involvement cannot be erased. I’ll point to the difficult passage from Paul who says, “Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take away the members of Christ and make them members of a harlot? …Or do you not know that the one who joins himself to a harlot is one body with her? For He says, ‘The two will become one flesh’” (1 Cor. 6:15-16).  This teaches us that what we do with our bodies is not simply casual or fleeting; in fact, traces of our actions remain with us in our bodies as well as in our spirits. No one is free from these consequences. 

However, in the context of Genesis 2:24, this statement of unity is immediately followed by the story of the temptation and fall, in which each person is treated as an individual, and in which one person blames another person for his own choice. This shows a limit to the degree to which “one flesh” applies to a relationship in which there are two persons. Each is still responsible as an individual to God.

Jesus went on to teach that second marriages while the first spouse is still alive, even after a legal divorce, is committing adultery. This can be seen as logically following on from the premise of union as one flesh that cannot be undone. However, it is important to understand the context in which a divorce for any cause—any cause—was popular at his time. Jesus spoke into that context. (See the parallel passage in Matthew 19, where the question was: “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause at all?”) Jesus confronts his hearers with the idea that a divorce for trivial causes is no divorce at all. I think he also speaks obliquely against the practice of polygamy as well, despite its prevalence in Israel’s history.

Notably, he never said that divorce because of “hardness of heart” cannot happen. He did not set aside the Mosaic requirements that a husband provide food, clothing, and companionship to a wife.  His taught only that even those who experience a hard-hearted spouse cannot erase the fact of the union they have had with each other. I expect that anyone reading this who has been divorced will agree that a divorce does not magically erase that relationship.

If you have more questions about the topic of divorce, and who doesn’t, please take a look at Dr. David Instone-Brewer’s work on it. Here’s a place to start.

https://www.baylor.edu/ifl/christianreflection/MarriageArticleInstoneBrewer.pdf

Jesus and His Bible Part 6

One Misunderstanding after Another

After Jesus had chided the disciples for worrying about having literal bread, and he had healed a blind man, they walk along through the villages of Caesarea Philippi. He asked them what they think about him. Peter answered, “You are the Christ.” 

Jesus followed this up in a way that surprised his disciples. He told them plainly that the Christ, the Son of Man (Jesus’s preferred title for himself), must suffer and be rejected and killed, only to be resurrected on the third day. Peter objected, and Jesus treated his objection as he did the temptations of the devil in the desert. All this must have been very surprising to the disciples and likely hurtful to Peter.  

I wonder if this relates directly to the two-part healing of the blind man, especially after Jesus pointed them towards the double meanings of his actions. At first the blind man saw unclearly, similar to their understanding of the work of the Messiah. It was not enough that they identified Jesus as the Christ because they also continued to misunderstand the work of the Christ. So Jesus went to work to clarify their vision, and they did not get it even then.

And Jesus makes it more poignant by insisting that those who want to follow him should expect their own cross, should expect to trade their whole lives in for the work of following Jesus. 

Jesus then took Peter, James, and John up the mountain where they saw him transfigured and accompanied by Moses and Elijah. They were astonished, and Peter blurted, “Let us make tabernacles here for the three of you.”

God replied, “This is my beloved Son; listen to him.”

They did not yet understand what Jesus was telling them about dying and rising again, and they were still unable to look at the scripture with imagination, so they asked when Elijah was to come to herald the Messiah. Jesus said, “He has already come, and they killed him.” From this they could have realized that the prophecy was a parable also, and that John the Baptist had filled the function of Elijah. 

They arrived back with the other disciples to discover that a child had been brought for healing who was so oppressed by evil so that he could not speak and had dangerous seizures. The disciples could not heal him, and the father begged Jesus to intervene “if you can.” Jesus admonishes the father to have faith and then heals the boy.

When the disciples got Jesus alone, they asked why they could not cast out this evil. It is not surprising they were puzzled because earlier Jesus had given them authority to do just this (see Mark 6). Jesus responded that this kind came out only by prayer, which must have puzzled them further, and still puzzles people today.  

On the way to Capernaum, he again told them he must die and then rise again; their response this time was to talk among themselves about which of them was the greatest. Jesus had to correct their understanding of greatness by telling them that whoever wanted to be great must serve everyone else.  

So they’ve made three mistakes in understanding Jesus since the one about leaven. They refused to see that he must die, they wanted to make him an object of worship, and they thought he would set them up in a hierarchy. 

These are mistakes we still make today. We judge people based on their obedience to religious traditions. We deny the necessity of dying, the requirement to take up our own cross every day, the unavoidableness of suffering. We want to keep Jesus in a religious house where we can go to worship him. And we think Jesus set up a hierarchy.

We come to one more error, one which resonates today in the midst of our culture wars here in the United States and similar conflicts everywhere.  John told Jesus, “We found someone casting out demons in your name and we told him to stop because he wasn’t one of us.” 

This was a fraught issue, given that they had just failed to cast out a demon themselves, so it is not surprising they were unhappy to see someone else being successful. It is a human tendency also to want to keep any kind of power within one’s own in-group.  

But Jesus told them that “whoever is not against us is for us, whoever gives you water to drink because you follow me will be rewarded, whoever causes a little one who believes to stumble would be better off drowned in the sea; if your hand, foot, eye, causes you to stumble, get rid of it; better to enter God’s kingdom maimed than to be cast into Gehenna ‘where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.’ For everyone will be salted with fire (Mark 9:48). 

We can learn from what Jesus says that those doing good in Jesus’s name should be encouraged to continue, that those who cause other believers to stumble would be better off dead, and if we are controlled and hindered in discipleship by our ability to control, to be mobile, or to oversee our world, we’d be better off losing all control, mobility or vision in order to be able to enter God’s kingdom.  

The quotation is from Isaiah 66:24 and is for those who rebelled against God: “For their worm shall not die and their fire shall not be quenched” and they shall be an abhorrence to all humankind. And who are those rebels? Those who perform the rituals but prefer their own way. God promises to come in fire and whirlwind and execute judgment by fire on them. I am reminded of the cautionary comment in Hebrews, “Our God is a consuming fire”  (Hebrews 12:29), and of the passages in Paul’s epistles where our works are tested by fire in the judgment. Fire and wind are purifying and sanctifying agents, as witnessed at Pentecost with the sound of a strong wind and tongues of fire. By invoking this passage in Isaiah, Jesus taught his disciples to expect that God would indeed purify and sanctify them from their dependence on religious rituals and their preference for their own way.  

Isaiah goes on to add: “But to the ones who are humble and contrite and tremble at my name, I will extend peace and I will comfort like a mother comforts and nurses her children.  I will take some of them for priests; all humankind will come to bow down before me."  

What we learn: God prefers the humble, the contrite, and those who are awed by God’s name to any who set themselves up as enforcers, or any who perform the outward signs of religion while secretly following their own lusts and disobeying, or any who simply prefer their own way to God’s way. Jesus reinforces that by puncturing the disciples’ sense of being special: whoever is not against us is for us. I am not just for you twelve or seventy-two or the inner circle. 

And forbidding others to do good in Jesus’s name is like offending one of the little ones who believe in Jesus. It is a serious crime against life.

Jesus continually corrected the disciples’ misunderstandings to emphasize to them that they had to embrace suffering and humility and graciousness in order to follow him.  

Jesus and His Bible Part 5

The Disciples Miss the Point

Jesus declared all foods clean, and then he went into the Gentile region of Tyre. There he encountered the Syrian woman with the daughter oppressed by an evil spirit. After a dialogue with the mother, he healed the daughter. Then he and his disciples traveled to the region of Decapolis (still in Syria), where he healed a deaf person and enabled him to speak intelligibly. Then in chapter 8, the gospel of Mark records the second great feeding of a multitude, this time around 4,000 people, with 7 baskets of leftovers.These three miracles join with the healing of the Gerasene man to show Jesus taking his ministry into Gentile territories and to Gentile people. 

Afterwards, they crossed the Sea of Galilee to the west side, back into Jewish territory. There the Pharisees came out to argue with Jesus and to get him to give them a sign, which he refused to do. Jesus and his friends got back into the boat, and ended up in Bethsaida, home territory.

Now as they were heading back home, while Jesus was warning them about the Pharisees and the Herodians, using the metaphor of leaven, or yeast, the disciples began discussing the fact that they did not have enough bread. 

Jesus said to them: “Do you not yet see or understand? Do you have a hardened (dull, insensible) heart? Having eyes, do you not see? And having ears, do you not hear?” (Mark 8:18). Do you not remember both feedings of the multitudes? With leftovers? Do you not yet understand? 

This rebuke is a quotation from the prophet Ezekiel, to whom God says: “Son of man, you live in the midst of a rebellious house, who have eyes to see but do not see, ears to hear but do not hear; for they are a rebellious house” (Ezek. 12:2).  

The context in Ezekiel is this. Ezekiel is a prophet during the Babylonian exile of the Jews. He hears from God that he is to act out a parable among the exiles that relates to the Jews still in Jerusalem, and that parable means that they too will go into exile.  

The allusion to Ezekiel makes me think that Jesus is advising his disciples to observe his actions as if they were parables.  He has fed multitudes with a few loaves and fishes; he has freed those oppressed by evil; he has just given hearing and speech to a deaf man. He is about to give sight to a blind man. By this rebuke to their own sight and hearing, he invites his disciples to bring their imagination and intelligence to bear on what all this means, what these signs point to. 

In Matthew, the story includes the words that the disciples realized he was talking about the doctrine of the Pharisees, not literal leaven. And that doctrine was one which judged people for not following religious traditions, and which always needed one more attesting miracle to prove that Jesus was the one sent by God, the Messiah.

Jesus and His Bible Part 4

 Jesus and Purity

The next time in Mark that Jesus quotes his Testament is in Chapter 7.  In the intervening story, Jesus has done the following:

• Told more parables about the Kingdom of God—the seed growing, the mustard seed growing;
• Stilled the storm on the sea;
• Freed the Gerasene (Gentile) madman from his demons;
• Brought Jairus’s daughter back from death;
• Healed (inadvertently) the woman who had bled for 12 years;
• Met unbelief in his home town; 
• Sent the 12 disciples out in pairs to preach;
• Fed the 5000 men plus women and children with 12 baskets left over
• Walked on the water to his disciples’ boat.

The level of activity is breath-taking to read. In these encounters and events, we see the growing awareness among his followers that he is not a run-of-the-mill itinerant preacher or prophet. They add to their undoubted affection and admiration a streak of fear when he stills the storm and walks on the water.  We also see that his home town is blind to his worth and that the Gentiles want him to go away. Mark’s Jesus inspires awe, and yet desperate people continue to beseech him for help.

 Jesus quoted his Testament in the context of a dispute with Pharisees over ritual purification.  In Mark 7, Pharisees noticed that the disciples ate with unwashed hands. Pharisees asked Jesus why the disciples did not keep the traditions. This  reflected on Jesus as a trustworthy teacher, so they were really asking about his relationship to the Law and ritual.

 Jesus said, “Rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written, This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far away from me. But in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men” (Mark 7: 6-7).

This is a reference to Isaiah 29:13:-14: "Then the Lord said, ‘Because this people draw near with their words and honor me with their lips, but they remove their hearts from me, and their reverence for me consists of tradition learned by rote,  therefore behold, I will once again deal marvelously with this people…and the wisdom of their wise men shall perish, and the discernment of their discerning men shall be concealed.’”

The context in Isaiah is a prophesy against Jerusalem, specifically that the city will undergo a military siege, defeat, and a return to dust, accompanied by thunder, earthquake, tempest, and the flame of a consuming fire. Strikingly, God tells Isaiah that this vision will be like a sealed scroll to his audience, a scroll the literate will reject because it is sealed, and the illiterate because they cannot read. It is followed by the pronounced woe to those who act secretively, who consider themselves wiser and more understanding than God, who are like pots thinking themselves equal to their potter.

This chapter in Isaiah ends with a prophecy concerning bringing hearing to the deaf, sight to the blind, gladness to the afflicted, causing the needy to rejoice in the Holy One of Israel. But also ending the ruthless, finishing the scornful, cutting off those intending evil, those who pervert justice with lies and bribes. Christians will see Jesus in these words, which express the hopes of humankind for a better future. 

It is clear where Jesus included those who were preoccupied with ritual purity—they were among the ruthless, the scornful, those willing to bully, lie and cheat for their own ends. 

Jesus went further with his indictment of Pharisees. Jesus said they put traditions ahead of the commandment of God, quoting Moses: “‘Honor your father and your mother’ and ‘he who speaks evil of father or mother, let him be put to death’ but you say ‘If a man says to his father or his mother, anything of mine you might have been helped by is Corban—given to God’—thus invalidating the word of God by your traditions which you have handed down, and you do many such things like that” (Mark 7:9-11).

This commandment to care for parents deals directly with human relationships, calling the young to care for the old. The familiar context is the 10 commandments given to Moses by God on the stone tablets: “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be prolonged in the land which the Lord your God gives you” (Ex. 20:12, see also Deut. 5:15). It is worth noticing that Jesus quoted only the command. When God says to do something positive, do it regardless of outcome, may be the message.  [Robert Alter notes that “it is hard to square the causal link between honoring parents and longevity with empirical observation, and one probably has to regard this as part of the traditional wisdom of the ancient Near East, the sort of hopeful moral calculus reflected in the book of Proverbs” (Moses, 297, n.).]

Jesus also invoked the flip side of caring for parents. In a list of capital offenses is included the following: “And he who curses his father or his mother shall surely be put to death”) (Ex. 21:17, see also Lev. 20:9). Robert Alter translates “curses” as “vilifies,” and notes that it connects with treating parents with contempt. (Moses, 303, n.). Jesus condemns the tradition that makes it a good deed to give away “to God” money or goods  that one’s parents need. He makes clear that human need is more important than looking good.

Jesus followed this by an address to the multitude: “Listen to me and understand: there is nothing outside the man which going into him can defile him; but the things which proceed out of the man are what defile him” (Mark 7:15). Jesus directly confronted Jewish dietary laws about what could and could not be eaten. He explained to the disciples that, literally, what a person eats goes into the stomach and is eliminated, causing no impurity.  Mark asserts that this means “he declared all foods clean,” an interpretation confirmed by Peter’s vision on the rooftop detailed in Acts 10. This vision expanded the acceptability of all foods to include the acceptability of all persons, whether Jewish or not. Those of us who yearn for rules and guidelines that will make us acceptable to God are out of luck.

What is defiling before God are the ways we harm each other that derive from evil thoughts, pride, and foolishness. Again Jesus sets to the side the interpretations of the Law and the religious traditions that hinder us from caring for the human needs we encounter.

Jesus and His Bible, Part 3

Jesus and the Prophet Isaiah

Between the event in the previous post and today’s study, Mark has moved briskly through the following events:

• Jesus healed a man with a withered hand in the synagogue on Sabbath;
• Jesus preached to huge crowds from Galilee and from Idumea, Tyre and Sidon (non-Jewish audience);
• Evil spirits identified Jesus as the Son of God;
• Jesus chose the twelve;
• Jesus’s own people tried to take him into their care, thinking him mad;
• Jesus identified those who do God’s will as his family;
• Jesus told the parable of the sower and the seed.

When his disciples ask him about his parables, this is his response.

“To you has been given the mystery of the kingdom of God; but those who are outside get everything in parables; in order that while seeing, they may see and not perceive; and while hearing they may hear and not understand; lest they return again and be forgiven” (Mark 4:11-12).

This quotation links the ministry of Jesus with the prophetic ministry of Isaiah:

"Then I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, 'Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?' Then I said, 'Here am I. Send me!' And He said, 'Go, and tell this people: "Keep on listening, but do not perceive; keep on looking, but do not understand." Render the hearts of this people insensitive, their ears dull, and their eyes dim, lest they see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, and repent and be healed'" (Isaiah 6:8-9).

This is from the famous passage where Isaiah sees the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lifted up, with a train that fills the temple. Isaiah responds with terror, as anyone would, and identifies himself as a man of unclean lips living among a people of unclean lips. The word “unclean” has a history in the Law; people were rendered unclean by touching a dead body, by bodily discharges, by leprosy, by numerous causes, and in an unclean state were prohibited from engaging in worship with the community. We can infer that Isaiah had not made himself unclean in these ways since he was in the temple.

But he sees himself as essentially unclean when he sees the holiness of God, and in this he represents all of us. His cry, “Woe is me!” is the cry of all humanity when we see the difference between ourselves and God. His immediate understanding that he is a person of polluted language and boundaries (things represented by lips) applies to all of us. 

And it makes the reaching out of God to humanity through Jesus so necessary and important.  As Jesus, who identified himself always as the son of humanity,  says, “Whoever has seen me has seen my Father.” 

The sting in this quotation is for those who do not perceive their essential neediness before God, those who listen but do not hear, who see but do not understand. These will never turn back to God, will never face into God’s holiness and their own need. These people can be completely religious, and yet not healed.

By identifying himself  with the vision and calling of Isaiah, Jesus also admits and predicts a similar certainty that many people will not see, listen, or understand his own person and ministry; therefore they will not repent, and by this lack of repentance they will be judged. The parables are therefore challenges to us: will we listen with our spirits and imaginations? Will we look for how they call us to repent?