Posted by: Keith Clark | March 14, 2012

Review: How God Became King by N.T. Wright

In his latest book, How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels, N.T. Wright addresses what he perceives to be a “fundamental problem deep at the heart of Christian faith and practice”: “we have all forgotten what the four gospels are about” (ix). On the surface, then, the book appears to aim to help readers rediscover what the gospels are about and how to read them for all they’re worth. Upon closer inspection, however, How God Became King is much more ambitious, for anyone who takes seriously Wright’s proposals for how to read the gospels will find that they transform the way one reads not only the gospels, but the entire Bible.

The opening part of the book addresses the ways in which the church has struggled to read the gospels well. Wright contends those who have taken cues from the ancient creeds have often failed to reckon with the great emphasis the gospel writers place on Jesus’s life. On the other hand, those who have taken cues from post-Enlightenment critical scholarship have failed to reckon with the bookends (birth and death) of Jesus’s life highlighted by the creeds. Neither approach, having neglected significant portions of the gospels in their final forms, can be said to fully grasp what the gospels are all about, for each fails to hold together the themes of kingdom and cross which the gospels insist are inextricably intertwined. The fundamental problem Wright diagnoses in the preface can be recognized most clearly in six common, but inadequate answers often provided by the church to the question “What are the Gospels all about?”: instructing people how to go to heaven (42-46), recording Jesus’s unique ethical teaching (46-48), portraying Jesus as a moral exemplar (48-50), presenting Jesus as the perfect sacrifice (50-52), telling stories with which humans can identify and thus find direction (52), and demonstrating Jesus’s divinity (53-57). While each of these answers contains an element of truth, Wright argues they all fail to grasp the heart of the gospel accounts.

In part two, Wright utilizes the image of a sound system with four speakers, one in each corner, to describe the four dimensions of the gospels to which readers must pay attention. He insists the reason most churches and most Christians have failed to grasp what the gospels are all about is the speakers are out of balance, with some turned up too loud and others turned way down or even unplugged from the system. In order to properly hear the gospels’ message, the four dimensions of the gospels must be properly calibrated, like the four speakers of a sound system. The first speaker, turned so low it’s been inaudible to many Christians, is the gospels’ presentation of their message as “the climax of the story of Israel” (65). The second speaker, turned up so loud that it’s distorted, is the gospels’ portrayal of “the story of Jesus as the story of Israel’s God coming back to his people as he had always promised” (83). The third speaker, distorted like the second, is the gospels’ intent as foundational documents to tell “the story of the launching of God’s renewed people” (111-112). The fourth speaker, which hasn’t even been hooked up to the system, but has been in storage in the attic, is the gospels’ account of “the story of the kingdom of God clashing with the kingdom of Caesar” (127). Drawing upon his almost unparalleled ability to hear echoes of the Hebrew scriptures in the gospels, to make connections between the two testaments, and to present them in such a way that the reader can easily see how the scriptures as a whole fit together, Wright’s treatment of these four dimensions is an absolute tour de force.

Having sought to address the problem of missing the gospels’ point by calibrating the four speakers, in part three Wright considers the implications of hearing the gospels’ message in its intended harmony. This is a difficult challenge, because “not only have we misread the gospels, but . . . we have made them ordinary, have cut them down to size . . . ” (158). Rather than holding together the themes of kingdom and cross, Christians have polarized into camps of “kingdom Christians” and “cross Christians” while at the same time being sucked into post-Enlightenment delusions of utopian grandeur that try to ignore the failure of the Enlightenment to turn the corner of world history. Wright suggests Christians have reacted to the Enlightenment’s failure in four unhelpful ways: assuming the world doesn’t matter because soon they’ll leave the world behind for heaven, withdrawing to form a parallel society in which to live out the values of Jesus, baptizing right-wing politics as Christian, and baptizing left-wing politics as Christian. The trouble with these approaches, Wright asserts, is that each fails to take seriously that Jesus was inaugurating God’s cross-shaped kingdom on earth as in heaven, and it is into this vision that followers of Jesus, readers of the gospels, are called to live. Wright then explores the ways each of the four dimensions of the gospels’ message holds together the themes of cross and kingdom, just as they are in fact held together in the Hebrew scriptures.  Further, he demonstrates that from beginning to middle to end, the stories in the gospel which are often read as highlighting either kingdom or cross are actually highlighting both, so that they can make perfectly clear they are telling the story of God becoming King.

Wright closes the book with a chapter that seeks to demonstrate the way in which this approach to reading the gospels can transform the way the church reads the gospels. Rather than reading the gospels through the lens of the creeds, which has led to reductionist readings of the gospels, churches can read the creeds through the lens of the gospels, which will allow the creeds to make their points in a manner more consistent with the overarching story of both scripture as a whole and the gospels. Given the growing number of churches and Christians for whom the creeds play an insignificant role or no role, I wish Wright had taken time to broaden the scope of his reflections in this chapter. Even those who don’t utilize the creeds proper in worship still have unofficial creeds which shape their approach to scripture and the gospels just as significantly as the official creeds. These unofficial creeds take the form of elements of the liturgy including hymns/praise and worship songs, influential writers/preachers/pastors, or other dogmas to which they adhere (political, scientific, religious, etc.). I fear some will not make this connection and thus miss the opportunity to begin reading these unofficial creeds through the lens of the gospels rather than reading the gospels through the lens of their unofficial creeds.

My only other quibble with the book relates to Wright’s assertion that the gospels’ message centered upon the unity of kingdom and cross is aimed at transforming readers into suffering kingdom-bringers. My frustration is not a matter of disagreeing with Wright’s assessment of the gospels’ intention. Rather, it stems from the lack of a clear vision of how this plays out. Wright, like others who draw similar conclusions, humbly admits his own lack of suffering and acknowledges the much greater suffering of many around the world. Yet, at what point do such admissions and acknowledgments fall short? At what point does lack of suffering disqualify our claims to be followers of Jesus? Are we to seek out suffering? Or are we simply to continue making such admissions and acknowledgments until we ourselves face legitimate suffering, if indeed we ever do? Wright fails to wrestle with these questions. So while he may have provided an approach to reading the gospels which helps us remember what the gospels are all about, he fails to deal adequately with the questions bound to arise when facing the challenge of figuring out what it looks like to live into their vision. I hope he or someone else will wrestle with these questions in greater depth in the future.

Coming hot on the heels of his outstanding book on Jesus, Simply Jesus, I wondered whether a book on the gospels would seem redundant. But as I read How God Became King, it became clear not only that it is not redundant, it is a perfect follow-up, because while it’s about the story of the gospels, it’s about much more than that. It is about the story of God and creation, the story of the entire scriptures. In How God Became King Wright provides much needed pastoral instruction aimed at helping churches recover the gospels as the primary agent shaping their being and activity, he demonstrates the degree to which the canonical gospels set themselves apart from those not included in the canon, and he offers individual Christians an approach to reading scripture that can inform them so they are able to engage the world not on the terms of the powers, but on behalf of the God who became King on earth as in heaven. I wholeheartedly recommend it!

Disclaimer: Thanks to HarperOne for a review copy. I was not obligated to write a positive review.

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Posted in Book Review, God, Kingdom of God, N.T. Wright

Posted by: Keith Clark | March 13, 2012

Sermon Scraps – 3/4/12 – Downward Mobility

Sunday I continued my series of sermons on Mark’s gospel. My text for the sermon (“Along the Road“) was Mark 9:30-10:52. In thinking through the implications of Jesus’s attempt to redefine the disciples’ expectations of the Messiah and their ideas about following him, I can think of few resources as instructive as Scott Bessenecker’s outstanding book, How to Inherit the Earth: Submitting Ourselves to a Servant Savior. I found the following passage particularly poignant as I prepared this sermon:

The must-read list for every leader in Jesus’ (sic) kingdom includes titles like Be Last! Five Easy Steps to Becoming Everybody’s Slave and 101 Ways to Welcome Children. There is a certain tongue-in-cheek humor with Jesus on this, a kind of irony which struck at the very heart of their desires for greatness. Jesus wasn’t just showing them a better way of obtaining the thing they wanted; I believe he was attacking the very nature of their quest. He was saying, “Why all this jockeying for position? If there is a position worth jockeying for it’s last place, because that’s where I hang out. The attitude required to get down on your hands and knees and make a six-year-old feel welcome is what you should be striving after, not this ladder-climbing, puffed-up posture.”

When Jesus placed that little child in the midst of the Twelve–a group including burly fishermen–in answer to their question about who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven, the disparity must have been almost laughable: twelve grown men, seasoned by intense ministry experiences; apostles now in their own right having been sent out two-by-two to preach, heal and raise the dead; towering in stature over what might have been an eight-year-old little girl or boy. The physicality of placing the child “among them” was intentional. Jesus wanted them to appreciate the distance required for them to get from where they were–muscling for power and authority–to where they needed to be–vulnerable, dependent, meek and trusting. In fact, in another incident where the disciples were elbowing one another for first place, Jesus went so far as to say that not only could the disciples not be great in God’s kingdom unless they humbled themselves like a child, they couldn’t even enter without the simplicity and humility of a child.

Rather than holding up political, religious or commercial leaders as pictures of greatness, Jesus encourages us to model ourselves after children. If that’s not a call to downward mobility in a culture intoxicated with growing wealth, power or fame, I’m not sure what is. (36-37)

I wonder what it would look like if the church embraced Jesus’s call to downward mobility?

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Posted in Discipleship, Scott Bessenecker, Sermon Scraps, Service, The Gospel of Mark

Posted by: Keith Clark | March 7, 2012

How To Read The Bible Through The Jesus Lens by Michael Williams

The tagline of the recently released How to Read the Bible through the Jesus Lens by Michael Williams makes the following claim: “covers every book of the Bible in the tradition of the bestselling How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth.” On my reading, however, the two could hardly be more different. For All Its Worth is an outstanding introduction for readers attempting to get a handle on basic challenges to reading the Bible, including the variety of literary genres employed in scripture, the disparate settings (cultures, places, times, etc.) in which the various texts were written, and the necessary task of interpretation. Thirty-one years after its original publication, it remains one of the first books I’d hand to someone interested in reading the Bible. In contrast, The Jesus Lens fails to inform interested readers of scripture on how to approach the Bible. Rather, it does little more than draw parallels (which are often a stretch, at best) between the life and ministry of Jesus and small portions of the messages in each of the books of the Bible, which are said to constitute the “Jesus lens” through which the Bible was intended to be read (9). Particularly telling concerning the difference between the two books is Williams’s assumption that there is no need to make a case for or convince readers as to the veracity of his assertion that the Bible is meant to be read through the “Jesus lens,” an assumption that stands in stark contrast to the 15 page introduction to For All Its Worth titled: “The Need to Interpret.”

In agreeing to review The Jesus Lens for Zondervan, I was asked to focus on a particular group of biblical books. I chose to focus on the minor prophets, in order to assess the manner in which Williams either allowed the prophets to have their distinctive voices or muted their voices. Unfortunately, the prophets’ voices are largely muted during Williams’s discussion of these books. He repeatedly jumps so quickly from judgment to hope that the prophetic message of judgment seems hardly worth taking seriously. Further, when he moves to hope he virtually always does so by speaking of Jesus, a tactic which will reinforce the commonly held notions that the God of the Old Testament is harsh and that the God of the Old Testament and Jesus are distinctly different (though I’d like to give Williams the benefit of the doubt and assume this was unintentional). Moreover, Williams utilizes penal and juridical metaphors virtually every time he makes mention of Jesus’s death, seemingly ignoring the fact that most of the prophetic language understood to be anticipating the Messiah fails to use such metaphors. In other words, Williams seems to be imposing his particular theological system on the prophets, instead of allowing them to shape his theological system. Why not view Jesus through the lens of the prophets (and other books/voices in the Bible) rather than vice versa?

Besides more substantial critiques, the book suffers from the use of trivial images and metaphors (e.g. “more unfaithfulness than a daytime soap opera” [113], “our relationship skills are about six fries short of a Happy Meal” [116], and “we have an uninterruptible, continuous Wi-Fi connection to the God of justice and mercy” [136]). I was also struck by the overuse of masculine pronouns to refer to God, which seemed particularly unfortunate when discussing texts in which God is portrayed using feminine imagery and metaphors. Perhaps the greatest shortcoming of the project is apparent in the seeming arbitrariness of its structure. It’s hard to make sense of the author dedicating just two more paragraphs to his discussion of Jeremiah (52 chapters) than his discussion of Obadiah (1 chapter) and including one more paragraph in his discussion of Philemon (1 chapter) than his discussion of Acts (28 chapters).

Last night, Zondervan put on a webcast with Michael Williams, in which he asserted that the majority of Christians learn about the Bible as a bunch of “unconnected details” and he wanted to “show how the pieces fit” and give them a “framework for how to make sense of all the Bible’s stories.” The bottom line, though, is that those who want to see how the pieces fit or understand how to make sense of all the stories would be far better served turning to any number of N.T. Wright’s books, particularly Simply Jesus, or Scot McKnight’s The King Jesus Gospel.

Disclaimer: I received a review copy from Zondervan but what not required to write a positive review.

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Posted in Book Review, Michael Williams, Scripture

Posted by: Keith Clark | March 6, 2012

Sermon Scraps – 3/4/12 – The Challenge of the Gospel

Sunday I continued my series of sermons on Mark’s gospel. My text for the sermon (“Belief and Unbelief“) was Mark 8:22-9:29, which introduces the second part of Mark’s gospel. In wrestling with the challenging nature of Jesus’s call to discipleship, I found the following thoughts from two of N.T. Wright’s books to be quite illuminating.

First, from his fantastic book of a couple years ago, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters:

Jesus didn’t say, as do some modern evangelists, “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.” Nor did he say, “I accept you as you are, so you can now happily do whatever comes naturally.” He said, “If you want to become my followers, deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me” (Mark 8.34). He spoke of losing one’s life in order to gain it, as opposed to clinging to it and so losing it. He spoke of this in direct relation to himself and his own forthcoming humiliation and death, followed by resurrection and exaltation. Exactly in line with the Beatitudes, he was describing, and inviting his followers to enter, an upside-down world, an inside-out world, a world where all the things people normally assume about human flourishing, including human virtue, are set aside and a new order is established.

Jesus would have said, of course, that it’s the present world that is upside down and inside out. He was coming to put it the right way up, the right way out.  That shift of perception is the challenge of the gospel he preached and lived, and for which he died.

What this means is that . . . [human beings] are summoned to follow a leader whose eventual goal is indeed a world of blessing beyond bounds, but whose immediate goal, the only possible route to that eventual one, is a horrible and shameful death. (115)

Second, a shorter passage from Jesus and the Victory of God:

Once again, the summons (‘We are going up to Jerusalem; the son of man will suffer, but will be vindicated; so take up your cross and follow me!’) could well have sounded like the call to revolution. Those who answered such a call would have to be prepared to act in such a way that, if they were caught, they would be likely to pay for it with their lives. . . . The thought that Jesus actually intended his followers to die seems, however, no more to have entered the disciples’ heads than the thought that his talk about a cross meant that he himself intended to do so. (304)

It pains me to think that this last sentence seems to be just as true of Christians today as of the disciples in Jesus’s day. How would my life and your life change if we were to take this seriously? God help us to take this seriously.

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Posted in Discipleship, N.T. Wright, Sermon Scraps, The Gospel of Mark

Posted by: Keith Clark | March 3, 2012

Weekly Wrap

  • If you’re interested in history or preaching or Martin Luther King, Jr. or all three, you ought to grab a copy of Richard Lischer’s The Preacher King: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Word that Moved America, available this month for the Kindle (or any of the Kindle apps, including the Amazon Cloud Reader), for only $1.99.
  • As a parent, these reflections on the concept of a “healthy dose of risk” have been eye-opening. Yet I also find myself wondering if churches’ lack of a healthy dose of risk isn’t largely responsible for the incredible amount of anxiety they bear. Perhaps this is a prophetic challenge to churches as well.
  • Here’s another outstanding article on parental aversion to risk, including this money quote: “We need, as parents, to help our children develop the values and the resilience and the capacity to engage with the online world unassisted.” Check out the full article, “Our Internet Safety Obsession is Bad for our Children,” which is about far more than internet safety.
  • Christianity Today’s on-the-point preview of the new ABC show, GCB, about which there is sure to be much ado by folks who will completely miss the point.
  • If you’re interested in music in general, or the blues in particular, you’ll want to check out this thought-provoking article, “White Rock Privilege and Blues Thievery.”
  • With the increasing problem of over-crowding in prisons, I wonder if unique sentences like this one will become more common and whether they could possibly be more effective in promoting rehabilitation.

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Posted in Books, Church, Kindle Books on Sale, Ministry, Music, Parenting, Technology, Television, Weekly Wrap

Posted by: Keith Clark | March 1, 2012

Sermon Scraps – 2/26/12 – The Significance of the Data

Sunday I continued my series of sermons on Mark’s gospel. My text for the sermon (“Do You Still Not Understand?“) was Mark 8:14-21, a text which serves, at least in part, to wrap up the first part of Mark’s gospel. As I reflected on the text’s account of the interaction between Jesus and his disciples, I found helpful some reflections on this text in Walter Brueggemann’s outstanding little book Journey to the Common Good. While I didn’t speak directly about the scarcity/abundance contrast Brueggemann astutely observes in this text, Brueggemann’s reflections on Jesus’s style of teaching in this interaction with the disciples shaped the way I portrayed the interaction in my sermon.

After these two feedings, Jesus, the master teacher, invites his disciples to reflect on what they had seen. They are in a boat together. They have forgotten the bread, not remembering that Jesus is in the abundance business. Jesus asks the disciples hard question to which they make no response…. He wants them to reflect on his work of abundance. But they avoided eye contact and make no response. The disciples are beyond their interpretive capacity, because they do not know what to make of the new abundance caused by Jesus.

Like a good teacher, Jesus retreats to more concrete operational questions:

  • How many baskets of bread were left over in chapter 6 when I fed five thousand?
  • They are eager with an answer: “Twelve.”
  • How many baskets of bread were left over in chapter 8 when I fed four thousand?
  • They are eager with an answer: “Seven!”

The disciples are very good at concrete operational question. They know the data, but they have no sense of its signficance. The narrative concludes with one of Jesus’ saddest verdicts:

Do you not yet understand?

Mark 8:21

Do you not understand that the ideology of scarcity has been broken, overwhelmed by the divine gift of abundance? (33-34)

As I continue to chew on these wise words of Brueggemann, I find myself wondering if perhaps we’ve spent a lot of time in church helping people become “very good at concrete operational questions,” who “know the data, but . . . have no sense of its significance.” What would it take for the church to help people have a sense of the data’s significance?

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Posted in Discipleship, Sermon Scraps, The Gospel of Mark, Walter Brueggemann

Posted by: Keith Clark | February 29, 2012

Broken Hallelujahs 6

I’m continuing to blog through Christian Scharen’s outstanding new book Broken Hallelujahs: Why Popular Music Matters to Those Seeking God. I invite you to grab a copy of the book and join me in reflecting on it.

Scharen opens Chapter 6 of Broken Hallelujahs (“Surrender to the Music”) by briefly returning to Plugged In‘s review methodology. He does so in order to highlight the degree to which many simply aren’t paying attention to the “shrill danger warnings” sounded by Plugged In. Here Scharen quickly addresses the two primary critiques I had of the previous chapter, recognizing Plugged In‘s complicity with “the multibillion-dollar industry dedicated to providing Christian with products guaranteed to be spiritually edifying” and citing critical comments regarding the arbitrary nature of “checklist Christianity” by readers of an interview with the senior editor of Plugged In (116). (I should note that this is my first time blogging through a book chapter-by-chapter, and I decided not to read the book as a whole before beginning, but to post in response only to a given chapter both in and of itself and in relation to previous chapters. Nevertheless, while I’m glad Scharen made mention of these two critiques of big-business and checklist Christianity, I still wish he’d gone to a bit more detail, particularly for the benefit of readers who may accept both of these manifestations of faith as healthy and positive.) Scharen’s intent in this chapter is not to belabor his critique of Plugged In, but to remind readers of the reason it is necessary to construct a better strategy for discerning whether to engage various expressions of the popular arts. Following C.S. Lewis, Scharen suggests “we view pop culture as also the domain of God, as potentially spiritually edifying, and as ‘innocent until proven guilty,’” (117) rather than guilty until proven innocent.

Before offering his approach to such discernment, Scharen carefully distinguishes his approach from that of Craig Detweiler and Barry Taylor, who want “‘to create a theology out of popular culture rather than a theology for popular culture’ . . . thus relocating the center of contemporary theology from the academy and the church to the culture surrounding them” (118). The trouble with this approach is it affords equal value to any and every assertion, without providing any rationale for sorting through the validity of various claims, which Scharen illustrates humorously by invoking George Strait’s “All My Ex’s Live in Texas” (119).

Instead, Scharen follows Lewis in attempting to determine whether engagement with the popular arts makes one a better person. After exploring a bit of Lewis’s personal and academic life out of which he wrote An Experiment in Criticism, Scharen turns to consider the difference between “enjoying” art for our own sake and “attending” to art for its own sake. In other words, the moment enjoyment becomes the focus, the discussion is no longer about the art itself, but those who “use” it. There is nothing wrong with using art, but there is a major problem when one’s enjoyment or lack thereof is the sole criteria by which art is determined to be worthy of engagement or not. Unfortunately, human selfishness exists as a significant obstacle preventing us from attending to art, because we tend to be so preoccupied with our enjoyment of it or lack thereof. It is the role of selfishness in this process that introduces the ideal role faith can play in human engagement with the arts: imitating Jesus in the losing of one’s own life, the setting aside of one’s own interests, and the opening up of ourselves to the other, no matter how different the other may be.

Scharen closes with these words which capture both the degree of difficulty inherent in this approach to engaging the arts and the promise it holds for individual Christians, the community of faith, and the world:

Yet too often Christians seek with all their might to hold on to their life in Christ. They run from “secular” culture, reject the popular arts in all their beauty and terror, and seek the purity and safety of their own Christian ghetto. [But] such a fearful response fails to fully answer our Lord’s call to follow. In trusting that Christ’s mercy is sufficient, we are enabled to give ourselves away to a broken and hurting world, seeking to understand it, love it, and ultimately share in its midst God’s ongoing work of reconciliation. (137)

I have been challenged by the contrast between “enjoyment of” and “attending to” the arts to carefully reflect upon the way in which I often allow my “taste” in music to inhibit me from actually experiencing music on its own terms, hearing what it has to say and how it chooses to say it. That’s not to say I’m going to force myself to start listening to Kanye West, but it is to say I think I need to be less judgmental when others speak of their connection to the music of Kanye and others. How does your “taste” make attending to art difficult for you?

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Posted in Book Review, Christian Scharen, Music, Scripture

Posted by: Keith Clark | February 25, 2012

Weekly Wrap

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Posted in Community, Creation, Environment, Food, Justice, Poverty, Vocation, Weekly Wrap

Posted by: Keith Clark | February 24, 2012

Humilitas by John Dickson

In his latest book, Humilitas: A Lost Key to Life, Love, and Leadership, John Dickson explores the virtue of humility. He begins by defining humility as “the noble choice to forgo your status, deploy your resources or use your influence for the good of others before yourself” (24). In successive chapters he explores the role of humility in leadership, makes a logical case for the practice of humility, and argues for the cultivation of humility on aesthetic grounds. Dickson then traces the historical path by which humility came to be regarded as a virtue as opposed to being despised. He credits the life, teachings, and ministry of Jesus with launching out in a new direction (toward humility) from the midst of a culture which prided itself on the attainment and preservation of honor. Having recognized Jesus’s impact on the status of humility, Dickson suggests humility generates abilities, determines one’s ability to influence others, inspires those with whom one interacts, and has the ability to foster harmony in the midst of a warring and divided world. He concludes the book with a chapter of practical suggestions for intentionally cultivating humility.

In Humilitas, Dickson’s avoids preaching to the choir by simply citing biblical passages about humility. Instead he makes a compelling case for the cultivation of humility by any and all people, regardless of faith or lack thereof. If, therefore, one is looking for a Bible study of humility, this is the wrong book to read. But if one is looking for a concise, persuasive call to humility that is grounded in historical inquiry, logical reasoning, sociological observation, and familiarity with the Christian faith, this is a great book to read.

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Posted in Book Review, Humility, John Dickson

Posted by: Keith Clark | February 23, 2012

Sermon Scraps – 2/19/12 – Alternative Social Practice

Sunday I continued my series of sermons on Mark’s gospel. Ched Myers’s commentary on this week’s text (Mark 4:35-5:43; 6:30-56; 7:24-8:9) in Binding the Strong Man inspired me to take the angle I took in preaching this sermon (“A Different Kind of Community“).

The socio-literary function of the first section of Mark’s Gospel was to tear down the “sacred canopy” that legitimizes what Mark perceived as oppressive social institutions. But he knew that the war of myths must at some point also offer a new and compelling symbolic world to warrant an alternative social practice if it hopes to attract and maintain converts. (186)

In reading and reflecting on this lengthy portion of Mark’s gospel, I was reminded how often the church has been quick to imitate Jesus’s criticism but slow to imitate Jesus’s offering of an alternative practice. Often, I think this failure to offer an alternative practice has resulted from our blindness to the alternative offered by Jesus in this portion of Mark’s gospel. Said another way, we’ve been able to articulate what we’re against and unable to put into words what we’re for, because we’re far more familiar with what we perceive Jesus to be against than what the gospel writers proclaim him to be for. May I, may we, have ears to hear and eyes to see not just what Jesus is against, but what Jesus is for, so that we might embody his alternative social practice.

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Posted in Discipleship, Sermon Scraps, The Gospel of Mark

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