The Last Week - Notes on Chapters 6 & 7

Chapter 6

• Good Friday carries all of the theological pre understandings of centuries of Christian observance.  
• The most familiar understanding is that Jesus died for the sins of the world.  This is a "substitutionary sacrificial" understanding.
• This understanding means we are all sinners.
• For forgiveness a substitutionary sacrifice must be offered.
• An ordinary human would be inadequate, therefore a perfect human is required.
• This understanding is "assumed" to be the "official" or "orthodox" understanding.  
• This understanding is NOT the only understanding and is found in a book written by St. Anselm in 1097.
• Sacrificial language is used in the New Testament but not exclusively.  A number of other metaphors are also used to explain what happened.    
• In Mark's Gospel the substitutionary sacrificial understanding is NOT present.  
• We often hear the story of Jesus's death as a composite of all the Gospels (as we do with the Christmas story)
• Because we've heard it one way for a long time it takes significant effort to hear how Mark tells the story without the influence of the rest of the New Testament. 
• Paul is the earliest author.  His letters are NOT narratives and do not include a story of Good Friday.  Since Paul's accounts are interpretations, there are no "uninterpreted" accounts of Jesus's death.
• Mark's narrative combines retrospective interpretation with history remembered.  
• Mark 15:1-21
• The collaborators (priests, elders, scribes) hand Jesus over to Pilate, the local representative of the empire.  The collaborators remain present.
• Pilate asks, "Are YOU King of the Jews?"  Jesus replies with equal mocking, "YOU say so."
• Pilate asks again and Jesus refuses to answer.  This is contempt for the authority.  Jesus does not speak again until "My God, My God…" 
• The scene with Pilate offering to release Barabbas follows.  "The crowd" stirred up by the collaborators are certainly a "manufactured" crowd provided by the collaborators.  
• Barabbas provides a counterpoint to Jesus.  Both are revolutionaries but one is violent and the other is not.  In Mark's time, the people had chosen violence.  They had chosen the way of Barabbas.  
• Jesus is tortured.  The process of crucifixion is a political statement by the empire.  Imperial terrorism to be a deterrent.  He is required to carry the cross bar.  
• Mark 15:22-32
• Mark is to the point with the crucifixion.  Mark's audience would be very familiar with the details.  
• The label "King of the Jews" was meant to mock as well.  Rome has power to execute your king.  
• Jesus was crucified between two bandits.  "Bandits" are either terrorists or freedom fighters depending on your point of view.  Ordinary criminals were not crucified.  
• Mark 15:33
• The darkness was metaphor, not an eclipse.  There were no eclipses then.
• Mark 15:34-41
• Jesus's words are "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" which is a quote from Psalm 22. 
• The curtain being torn is a metaphor as well.  Both darkness and curtain are a sign of judgement on the collaborators.  The curtain being torn is also an affirmation that access to God is now open to all.  
• The soldier is the first human in all of Mark's gospel to call Jesus "God's Son."  Not even Jesus's followers called him that but NOW a representative of Rome declares that Jesus IS God's Son and by implication, Caesar is NOT. 
• The women present remind us again that the men were absent.  Jesus and the early church gave women an identity that was not typical of the time in both Jewish and Gentile contexts. 
• Mark 15:42-47
• Jesus's body being removed is unusual.  Normally the body would be left as a warning and so there was nothing left to bury.  
• Understanding Jesus's death as sacrifice… We can understand his death as a sacrifice as in a person who sacrifices his life for his passion… the Kingdom of God.  (Like a firefighter, soldier, MLK or Ghandi)
• Sacrifice as a substitutionary sacrifice for sin is NOT a part of Mark's Gospel. 
• In Mark 10:45 there is a reference to Jesus "giving his life as a ransom for many."  "Ransom" is a Greek word which refers to liberation from bondage.  In context, Jesus was advocating a life of service which would lead his followers to liberation. 
• Mark understands Jesus's death as an execution by the authorities because of his challenge to the domination system.  Mark understands Jesus's death as a judgement on the collaborators.  Judgement is show as darkness and the torn curtain and judgement is further pronounced by the centurion who says that Jesus is God's Son and not the emperor.  
• Prediction and Fulfillment.  Many of us have heard the link between Old Testament prophecies and what happened with Jesus.  We were told this both was God's "plan" and proved Scripture's authority.  
• Scholarship shows that this is not the case.  Instead, early Christians used the texts they knew to connect what they saw happening with their tradition.  This is called "historizing" which is using an older passage in a newer story to make a connection.
• Psalm 22 therefore is a known passage that is used to interpret Jesus's death.  It is a prayer of deliverance and so places Jesus's death into that context of hope for vindication.  Good Friday is not complete without Easter!  
• Did God make this happen?  Just because we can see the good that came from this event, does not mean that it was God's will.  It is never the will of God that a righteous man be crucified.  It did not "have" to happen, but it was virtually inevitable, not because of divine will, but because that is what domination systems do to people who challenge them.  
• It happened to John the Baptist, to Jesus, and then will happen to Paul, Peter and James.  
• Jesus was not simply a victim though.  He was a protagonist with a passion for justice… for God's justice which came with the Kingdom of God. 
• Jesus's passion for the kingdom of God led to what is called his passion, his suffering and death.  
• Good Friday did not have to happen as Divine necessity.  As human inevitability it did since his passion collided with "normal" civilization.  "Civilization" had made injustice "normal" and that system killed Jesus.  
• Mark says Jesus was guilty of nonviolent resistance to imperial Roman oppression and local Jewish collaboration.  His final week was a sequence of public demonstrations and confrontations with the domination system and THAT is what killed him.  

Chapter 7

• Mark says nothing about Saturday.  So what was happening on Saturday?
• Mark was working within a Jewish tradition that vindicated martyrs.  In this tradition the faithful who had died would be either saved from death (like Daniel in the lion's den) or would be vindicated after death.  
• Of course, since Jesus died, Mark was working with the "after death" version.  
• In this understanding the "end times" were not the end of the world but the end of the time when the world was ruled by evil, violence and injustice.  It is NOT about the evacuation of the world for heaven but divine transfiguration of the God's world here.  
• That world would be abundant with enough food for all, contain a vegetarian harmony and warless peace.  
• The General Resurrection would bring the faithful back to live in that transfigured reality.  
• Mark believed that the Kingdom of God was already here!  God's Great Cleanup had started already!  
• The imagery of this new world is seen in Story, Hymns and Images.  Lions lying down with lambs, children and asps together etc. In 1 Peter in hymns and in Images such as icons that show Jesus breaking out of hell and pulling others out with him.  "The harrowing of hell"  
• For Mark, the Kingdom of God has already begun, the Son of Man has arrived already and the bodily resurrection has already begun.  
• For Mark, Jesus as Son of Man has been given the anti-imperial kingdom of God to bring to earth for God's people, for all those willing to enter it or take it upon themselves. 
• Because this has already begun but is not yet complete, it is to be understood as a COLLABORATIVE effort.  It is not an instant divine flash, but a joint project between us and God.  It is not us without God, or God without us.  It is not that we wait for God, but that God waits for us.  That is why, from one end of Mark to the other, Jesus does not travel alone, but always, always with those companions who represent us all, the named ones who fail him and the unnamed ones who do not.  (Mark hopes that those unnamed ones will be US!)