Day 293. NT Day 16. Mark 14-16.

The two minutes or so following the death of Jesus, according to Mark's Gospel, are filled with wild confusion. Yet they are also the most significant minutes in the history of the world, the beginning of a new relationship between God and humankind. 

From noon that Friday until three in the afternoon the world is cloaked in ominous darkness (15:33), as if light, the first of God's creatures, has been negated. The old creation has ended as it began, in darkness and meaningless chaos.

There is a terrible pause. Then Jesus utters a formless cry and breathes his last, and all at once "the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom" (15:38). In the older translations the curtain is called a "veil," but that gives the modern reader a false impression.  This curtain is by no means diaphanous; it is thick and heavy, less of a veil and more of a carpet, thick and richly embroidered with images of angels. It closed the opening between the Holy Place from the Holy of Holies, the innermost sanctum of the Jerusalem Temple, which only the High Priest could enter and then only once a year, on the Day of Atonement, to sprinkle sacrificial blood for the sins of the people. There was the strictest taboo against anyone else penetrating this room. Death was the forfeit.

Indeed, so holy was the place that the High Priest's robes were sewn with tiny golden bells so that when he did enter, he could be heard moving about.  And a rope was tied to his leg before he entered, so that if the noise of the bells ceased those waiting outside would know that he had died during the performance of his duties, and his body could be hauled out without further desecration of the place behind the curtain.  

By Jesus time the Holy of Holies was an empty room. The Ark of the Covenant, which it had once housed, had long since been destroyed or lost. But the room and the curtain that covered its entrance still had great symbolic power, a barrier representing the absolute transcendence of the God who is infinitely above and beyond the created universe, whose very name is so holy that it cannot be uttered.

So the cutting of the curtain from top to bottom at the moment of Jesus' death would be an act of wanton destruction and sacrilege, if God himself not already done it. He cut through the barrier from within to let himself out of the stuffy precincts of human religion. Now he is indeed Emmanuel—God with us. He not only is born among and lives with us, he also dies with us. With the death of Jesus the distance we had created between ourselves and God is finally and completely erased. Transcendence is swallowed up in immanence. Jesus dies so the men and women may live, and his Spirit is now completely present in the world. He is with us, the Good News. Now we can never be left alone.

In Mark's Gospel, the moment of Jesus' death represents the quantum leap forward into the Kingdom. Hidden until now, the true identity of the Man of Power and Mystery is suddenly revealed. The great irony for Mark is that the only person present who understands what has happened is the nameless Roman officer in charge of Jesus' execution. The last one who should recognize who Jesus is is the only one who does.

It is difficult to know what to make of the centurion's confession.  Does he really understand what he is saying? "Surely this man was God's Son" (verse 39) can be as easily translated, "Surely this was the son of a god"—and that is a pretty ambivalent confession. But faith is always ambivalent. No one fully understands who Jesus is or what happens on the cross. But that doesn't matter. For Mark the centurion's confession is still the climax of his gospel story. In his telling of it, Jesus' family does not know who he is. His disciples do not know who he is. The religious leaders of his own nation do not know who he is. His true identity remains hidden until the very moment of his death. And even then it is revealed only partially and incompletely to the eyes of faith.

Our faith is like the faith of the centurion; he reminds us of ourselves. He is uncertain, confused, knowing what he sees on the cross has changed everything, and yet unable to grasp its full meaning. Seeing the light, he is still in the dark—and so are we.

Day 292. New Testament Day 15. Mark 10-13

 The relationship between Christian obedience and material prosperity is broadly discussed in modern American Christianity. Certain prominent "evangelical" preachers have made a considerable windfall for themselves by telling people what they want to hear—that if they follow some sort of financial formula based upon "spiritual principles"--they will prosper financially. But the story of the rich man found in our reading for today directly challenges this "prosperity gospel." And at the same time it calls those who hear the call to follow Jesus to renounce earthly dependencies—including wealth—and live a life of "evangelical poverty."  

St. Mark tells us that "as [Jesus] was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked, 'Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?'" (10:17). As is so often the case in the gospels, we are not supplied with much background about this man. When Matthew tells the story, he informs us that Jesus' questioner is "young" as well as rich (Matt. 19:16-22). He is a nice Jewish lad who comes to Jesus the Great Rabbi, the New Moses, to seek advice as to how to live a life of perfect obedience to the Law. His youthfulness is central to the meaning of Matthew's story.

In Mark's gospel, however, we are not told anything about his age, except that it is implied by the words "from my youth" (v. 20) that he is no longer young. We have the sense that he is a mature man who is disillusioned by the search for certainty, and this gives his inquiry greater urgency. He chases Jesus down—in Mark's gospel Jesus is always in a hurry—and when he catches him, he presses upon him a life or death question: "Good Teacher, what must I do . . . ?"

Typically Jesus rejects any hint of flattery; "Why do you call me good?" he asks. This rebuff does not imply that Jesus has any particular awareness of his own sinfulness; at the end of Mark's Gospel Jesus is acknowledged as the sinless Son of God (15:39). Certainly from the Jewish point of view absolute goodness adheres to God alone (see Psalm 100:5), and it is an impiety to ascribe it elsewhere.  But the real point of Jesus' negative response is to establish that the whole human pursuit of goodness is futile. St. Mark shares with St. Paul a firm conviction that human beings are helpless in the power of sin (see Romans 7:18), and the evangelist uses the story of the rich man to insist that what he seeks—eternal life—is not available through obedience, no matter how rigorous. Moral perfection is not even an option for human beings. Even if we were obedient to the Law of Moses in all its detail, we would still lack that which is most crucial for our salvation—renunciation of all that is worldly and acceptance of God's gift of grace on God's terms—by naked faith and blind trust.

This is not Matthew's way of telling the story, but there is a basic difference between the theologies of Matthew and Mark. Matthew's is a gospel of obedience—for him discipleship means obedience to the Spirit of Jesus, the Living Teacher of the Church. On the other hand, Mark's is a gospel of faith. His focus is trust, and he is largely indifferent to the Law of Moses and its commands, which Matthew affirms and upholds (Matthew 5:17-20).

So in Matthew when the "rich young man" asks what he still lacks in his search for perfection, Jesus gives him prescription for a more rigorous obedience that goes beyond the Law of Moses (Matthew 19:21). In Mark we are told that Jesus "looking at him, loved him" (10:21), and so he gives him an honest answer--there is nothing you can do that will save you.  Righteousness is humanly impossible. Only faith, expressed in the rejection of all earthly dependencies, opens the door to eternal life—the life that alone deserves the name of life. And faith is exactly what the rich man in the story lacks, and cannot gain; he is "shocked" and goes "away grieving," still trusting ultimately in his "many possessions."  The disciples are likewise "perplexed" by Jesus' answer.

Jews of Jesus' time—and many contemporary Christians—regard wealth as sign of God's approval—seal of divine approval. The Old Testament stories of Abraham and Job are often mustered in support this belief, which went unchallenged in Jesus' time. But this is yet another way in which the Christian Gospel turned the world up-side-down. Jesus taught that wealth makes those who possess it self-sufficient, and is therefore a danger to our relationship to God and a barrier to grace, rather than a by-product of righteousness. And inequality, far from being an expression of God's will, is a sign of sin and yet another symptom of creation gone tragically haywire.