Month: December 2017

Mark 9:2

Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter, James, and John, and led them up a high mountain alone by themselves. There his appearance was transformed before their eyes,

a sixth-day sabbath
transforms valleys to mountains
in preparation for wilderness
straightening and testing

this is non-crowd activity
confirming every past
healing and teaching
including those on the way

such transformation
ocean deep or mountain high
invests actionable authority
blessing and assurance

a butterfly effect is present
in discipleship fishing
and a reverse effect is revealed
in prophetic analysis

For the moment, taking 9:1 as prelude to Jesus “transfiguration”, we have opportunity to let “six days” roll around in our imagination. Six days can be so full that they are one event—creation. Six days can drag on interminably—Moses waiting for a something, anything, after being called to Mount Sinai.

We can also see how Sabin-277, gets to, “The Transfiguration does in fact present an imaginative rendering of what God’s final kingdom will be like.” The presence of G*D doesn’t wait until death; it is a mere six days away, or six hours, or six minutes or seconds—or, BANG, Now! The presence of G*D is always in the air awaiting a kairotic moment of partnering.

The fancy word and religious jargon, “Transfiguration”, is, in the Greek μεταμορφόω (metamorphoō, to change into another form, transform). We all do this when we beam with pleasure or weep deep sorrow. Birth through a vaginal canal or shell is transformative. Rites of passage and cocoons show us this shift.

Even G*D changes. This is part of the import of how basic repentance is—contrary to a monotheistic tendency to concretize G*D for all time, even G*D transforms. It would be helpful to remember verses that Jesus would have known. Look up Genesis 6:6; Exodus 32:14; Judges 2:18, 2 Samuel 24:16; 1 Chronicles 21:15; Jeremiah 26:19; and Jonah 3:10. The King James Version uses “repent” in each of these verses. The version you use may have a variety of word choices to represent a change, a repentance, a metamorphosis. This exercise attempts to see Repentance behind its many appearances.

Mark 9:1

“I tell you,” he added, “that some of those who are standing here will not know death until they have seen the kingdom of God come in power.”

presence is power
this is not an options package

to be is to have effect
no matter what affect we present

if immediate assurance is desired
it can’t be given with a raised hand

to be alive readily demonstrates
a required evolutionary partnership

so no more waiting for a proof
only available after death

Do your best to understand why there would be a chapter break here. Does this simply stated assurance complete what has just been said? Is anticipation of some realized eschatology a needed lead-in to a Repentance or Transfiguration or Resurrection or Pentecost? My reading prefers this verse as a continuation.

Whichever way you would do the versification, remember this is still being spoken to the crowd and an implied reader as well as to the disciples.

Translations are all over the place with it comes to looking at the reference to death. Some sound as if the presence of G*D will arrive in All its power and glory, at which time they will die. Some talk about tasting death, seeing death, experiencing death. It seems wise here to continue in a poetic or metaphorical reading of γεύομαι (geuomai, to taste, experience, sample).

It is helpful to read paraphrases into more modern idioms. J. B. Phillips (~1950) and Eugene Peterson, forty years later:

…some of you standing here who will know nothing of death until you have seen the kingdom of God coming in its power! –Phillips

There is a sense of the transformative nature of death here that moves us beyond resignation or fear of an ending and experiencing what is hinted at in a mission of “repentance and trust”.

Some of you who are standing here are going to see it happen, see the kingdom of God arrive in full force. –Peterson

The emphasis here on the realization of G*D is disconnected from death. There is an experience awaiting. It even allows for dismissing the word “god” in favor of an edgy “Nature”.

Either way, these recognize Mark’s midrashic tendencies.

Mark 8:38

Whoever is ashamed of me and of my teaching, in this unfaithful and wicked generation, of them will the Son of Man be ashamed, when he comes in his Father’s glory with the holy angels.” 

angels hover near test sites
where humans partner
with one another
wrestling with saints and demons
to see their face
and hear their names

in each temptation
we hold on to beasts
morphed to angels
and back again to self
chipping away every suffering
to its merciful core

testing by testing
our illusions solidify
to be embraced
as Francis did his leper
in a moment
for e’er

in a beast’s lair
we are shamed
by our ease of blame
separating self from context
idolizing angels
assuming cheap unity

“Shame” is a tricky concept here as it may also be translated as simply “having nothing to do with” another. “You are dead to me”, may be a more colloquial way of indicating this ancient dynamic.

“Unfaithfulness” and “adulteress” are identifiers of idolatry. This shifts the first judgment of shame toward there being something more important or meaningful. This divide of importance reinforces the descriptor of “distanced from” rather than “ashamed of”.

Another way of coming at this verse might be: “Whoever will have nothing to do with me has chosen something less to be important and thus misses the mark. The Fullness of Humanity (Son of Adam) will then be missing for them when the Light of Creation returns from the wilderness with wild beasts and angels.”

The last part of this recasting harkens back to the important difference between a Word (“Let it be…”, “Beloved”) and a setting of a post-Edenic Wilderness. It also presages a next image of Transfiguration at a half-way point in Mark’s story (Doxa/Glory as Shining/Light).

Our location between Creation and Eschaton is a wild and wooly place to be. It is filled with choices, affirmations, betrayals, glory, and shame. Saving lives and losing lives, questions of meaning and importance—then, now, and when—come crowding around while we find a stillness at the current nexus of life and Life.

Mark 8:37

For what could a person give that is of equal value with their life?

the market value of life
continually under values
the value of the provisional

continually mistaking life
as a technique to achieve
a pre-supposed outcome
we are quick to exchange
one faded glory for another

smoke-filled mirrors
naming ourself most fair
substitute fame for substance

We know, firsthand, the power of economic systems. It is the backstory of nearly every other aspect of our life. When we are in sync, we are privileged and applauded for what we have done. This disguises the pervasive presence of the whole economy. When we are out of sync, we are trapped and blamed for the moral weakness of not succeeding. This excuses the false foundation of the whole economy.

These comments and questions about life bring us to what Myers103 calls the “mysterious calculus of Jesus’ nonviolence”. This puts us right in the middle of an on-going struggle in evolution—evaluating the amount of opening and closing sequential changes make.

James Russell Lowell’s poem places us at an ever-present crux of the matter:

Once to every man and nation, comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, some great decision, offering each
the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever, ’twixt that darkness and that light.

By what formula will we come out smelling like a rose when everything around us rots?

Is Nature “upward, still, and onward” or “red in tooth and claw”?

Where will you place your bet about consistency, what is truthful?

These questions continue to haunt, even during the noon-time of our life when, for a moment, all seems to have converged into a moment of pre-wilderness blessedness. Here, near the end of the first of two acts we have the questions that can be applied all the way through Mark’s tale and my life and yours: What is most valuable here and what will you change to partner with it? These are questions for Baptizer John, Herod, Pharisees, Disciples, Women at a Tomb, Jesus, G*D and Readers of Mark.

Mark 8:36

What good is it to a person to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?

why would people gain
their fondest dream
when such dreams
have no end

a realized dream
is a sad ending
to a journey concluded
before it began

life invites life
to ebb and flow
with thankful memories
and next larger calls

“Life” (Hebraic concept) is the preferable translation in these three verses, 8:35–37, to “soul” (Greek construct). There are implications to the interplay of gain and loss, fullness and emptiness, fulfillment and desolation, foreground and background.

The emptying of soul to arrive at life needs a maturity unattached to age or stage. David Galston, in God’s Human Future: The Struggle to Define Theology Today90, speaks about this whole denial, emptying process:

Emptiness is not a let down; it has nothing to do with disappointment. It is awakening. It is part of recognizing the “now-ness” of time, the way time is not set on a predetermined course but is open to new possibilities. The energy of a parable is its vision carved into story in order to awaken the immediate gift of awareness, the recognition of the possible, and realization that the “now” is both all we have all the universe has to offer. The crime is to forfeit the fullness of this emptiness for the deceptive fullness of dogmatic securities.

Sabin-1’s162 use of Wisdom writings and midrash processes also come into play here.

In the Wisdom writings, Wisdom is personified as a woman—inclusively nurturing, attractive and elusive, ceaselessly restoring order and attentive to whatever is life-giving. Mark portrays Jesus as a person with these very qualities of being. In so doing, he also portrays him as the opposite of the typical male hero of ancient writings— who is conventionally royal, rational, and powerful.

These two resources bring needed human/femine perspectives to a difficult conversation about meaning in what Althea Spencer-Miller describes as our current power paradigm of an “Eurocentric hetero-masculine Umwelten”.

This question refocuses a mission of “fishers of people” by shifting the appeal of an attractive call to the realities of living that vision within any economic system that offers gain. The urgent need is for “wilderness” and “emptiness”—a transfiguration of such a temptation.

Mark 8:35

For whoever wishes to save their life will lose it, and whoever, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, will lose their life will save it.

salvation presupposes evil
and its overcoming
one deus ex machina after another

lost to self in a larger G*D
is not a satisfactory process
regardless of how time-tested it is

whatever comes from a changed heart
participation in a present paradise
will simply be enough

easy judgments of lost and won
will fade in a partnering
beyond expected consequences

“Denial” is “a denial of one’s own presumed prerogatives or personal interests”, Bratcher 266.

This dives deeper than death, which comes to everyone. Here it gets very personal with expectations and power. No matter how small the hope or the privilege, we will do what we can to preserve our image. This stands behind the whole dynamic of colonial rule of dividing the local populace by having one portion police another. It accounts for the crassest discrimination coming from the next higher social strata to those being denied their whole humanity on the basis of one characteristic or another.

The reference to “good news” reminds us to check back with previous uses of that phrase. We are reminded in 1:1 that we are dealing with a process, not a static condition. In a sense we are always beginning to enter into a better tomorrow. This beginning spot is furthered in 1:15 when “good news” is not only about fulfillment, but present transformation or repentance in light of trusting such a vision.

This helps us listen to other language experiences with examples of denial from Bratcher266:
“to not worship oneself” (Mixtec),
“to not belong to oneself any longer” (Conob),
“to let go that which he wants to do himself” (Kiyaka),
“to not do what is passing through his mind” (Putu),
“to undo one’s own way of thinking” (Totonac),
“to leave himself at the side” (Huastec).

This, in turn, then brings us back to our larger self and to ask how we would translate this into the setting of our own life and the lives of our communal settings. Without updating our situation, it will take a third and fourth attempt by Life to bring us to attention.

Mark 8:34

Calling the people and his disciples to him, Jesus said,“If anyone wishes to walk in my steps, they must renounce self, take up their cross, and follow me.

see we are yet together
recommitted to a common journey
of spirit-plaining
increasing a beachhead here
eroding a headland there

mutual support and correction
to bolster larger intention
and hone prickly egos
until turning by turning
suffering comes ’round right

by double-crossed joy
betrayals step back
from privileged compulsion
to betray in turn
until crosses are crossed off

Joanna Dewey’s chapter in Levine35 describes a key difference in understanding this verse in the 1st Century and the 21st.

In modern Western post-Enlightenment societies the basic unit of society is understood to be the individual self. In such a culture, to renounce oneself comes to mean to renounce one’s very individuality. In antiquity, however, and indeed in much of the world still today, the basic unit of society is not the individual person but the multi-generational kinship group.

This leads Dewey to see a chiastic pattern critical to understanding this verse and not superimposing today’s world on a prior world.

A   If any want to follow after me,
B   let them renounce themselves [that is, deny kin]
B’  and take up their cross [that is, risk persecution]
A’  and follow me.

This is an important corrective to the kind of individualism that ends up in literalism and/or fundamentalism, whether Peter’s or our current capitalist variant.

When restarting to make the same point about a known arc of responsibility and consequence, Jesus returns to his wilderness experience of belovedness that includes an emptying of self to move beyond a temptation and encompass it in a larger view from its rear. Bratcher265 gives the alternative reading, “he must give up all claims upon himself”. This moves in the direction of continuing to move into a space beyond our location within a culture or current iteration of our personal identity. This larger mystic claim of unity with a larger future, is critical to dealing with fears of punishment and shame.

Mark 8:33

Jesus, however, turning around and seeing his disciples, rebuked Peter. “Out of my sight, Satan!” he exclaimed. “For you look at things, not as God does, but as people do.”

how gentle can a rebuke be
our competitive culture
resists restful relationships

anger flares where listening stops
blame erupts right righteously
claiming ultimate ground

once in awhile we can retranslate
a banishment to the end of the queue
into a climbing back on the wagon

come gather again
as we practice inviting
larger circles to hold steadfast

When called, Peter turned toward Jesus. With his calling Jesus away from what was identified as an expected first outcome of challenging power, Peter is told to go back where he came from.

This isn’t told directly. Jesus doesn’t address Peter face to face, rebuke to rebuke, scold to scold. Jesus has already turned around physically and finds the Satan not only with Peter, but with the disciples he is now looking at (and the reader who is looking in). There is wilderness all around.

Aichele105 helps us put this powerful language into a larger context: “It is a situation of open conflict between Peter’s messiah language and Jesus’ son of man language.” Now we can hold verses 8:29 and 8:31 together and explore their relationship.

This brings to a head tensions that have been brewing between expectations of carrying on the baggage of the past with a new understanding of what is good—as in good news. Peter’s Messiah does not carry Isaiah’s Suffering Servant within and through their being. Jesus’ son-of-man is all too weak (it is helpful here to read John Caputo’s, The Folly of God: A Theology of the Unconditional).

All language is metaphoric, multivalent. LaVerdiere-231, notes that being behind or following after someone is not a matter of banishment but a call to revival. He mentions Baptizer John announcing someone coming after him and the call of the disciples to follow behind Jesus. We are also set up to hear this in the next verse spoken to the crowd who would come after him (including the reader).

Try this translation from Swanson291, “But Jesus, after he turned and saw his disciples, scolded Peter”. Would Jesus have been silent about this if there weren’t an audience?

Mark 8:32

He said all this quite openly. But Peter took Jesus aside, and began to rebuke him.

clarity builds resistance
we now see
there is no exit
but through beloved birth
into test after test

when we can no longer evade
the consequences of life
an easy accommodation escapes
our gifts and grasp
enacted sadness rises

messengers of changed hearts
are blamable for our caughtness
between our past avoidance
and tomorrow’s glowing hope
which leaves us not alone

we dodge quietly as we can
until finally we noisily rail
against our pre-dawn cold
unable to let go
too panicked to grab hold

“Peter was not specifically commanding Jesus to quit talking in this way, so much as condemning his thinking and planning such a course of action as would lead to this result. If this meaning can be conveyed by a rendering such as ‘said to him, Don’t talk this way’, a relatively close equivalent of the Greek will have been found.” ~Bratcher264.

Here we have a direct denial of the consequence of prophetic action by those first called to carry a message of good repentance. To Jesus’ “Yes!”, comes Peter’s “No!”

In the next two teachings that repeat this understanding of the way the real world acts, there will follow ironic acts by the Twelve that directly contradict the message being given.

In all three occurrences, we find a pattern that indicates Mark is writing to his readers, not transcribing history. Malbon’s chapter on “Narrative Criticism” in Anderson40 notes, “After each misunderstanding, Jesus renews his teaching on this topic. Of course, each time Jesus teaches the disciples, the implied author teaches the implied reader. Repetition adds clarity and force.” Likewise, Fowler’s chapter of “Reader-Response Criticism” [Anderson69] puts it this way, “No one in the story seems to learn anything from these predictions. The reader, by contrast, cannot help but be educated by these signposts to future moments in the narrative.”

Together we are pushed to take a deep breath and consider what would need to change in our life and context that would lead us to humbly and forthrightly affirm Jesus’ analysis for ourself.

Mark 8:31

Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo much suffering, and that he must be rejected by the elders, and the chief priests, and the teachers of the Law, and be put to death, and rise again after three days.

original fear
touches deep
each life

terror needs facing
whether moving outward
or speeding toward

there is a sharp knife
hiding beneath suffering
ready for mean harm

first we receive
generations of feuding
mutual rejection

until even resurrection
is reverse terrorism
continuing fear’s way

our work is human-size
breathing deep
listening deeper

– – – — – –

[thanks to Thick Nhat Hanh and Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting through the Storm]

Even before calling disciples and engaging them in larger life, Jesus engaged the wilderness after being tempted to let Belovedness go to his head. His first proclamation had to do with repenting and trusting. Both of these are proto-teachings on encountering real life. In this world larger life requires the leaving of smaller living and that smallness is evident in its desire to cling on to a next generation, to not let go in a season of harvest.

Here is the δεῖ, the “necessity”, the “need”, the “must” that grows out of what Paul will later quote from a song of Jesus’ followers:

While created beloved,

we do not claim a privilege

to exploit others

but a partnership with all.

Sabin-1140, in her discussion of “Son of Man” equaling “Son of Adam” suggests substituting “human beings” for “Son of Man”. This leads her to later note, “…in a real sense Jesus is indicating that his pattern of suffering and death and rising again, is—or could be— paradigmatic for every human being.” Thankfully, Sabin-1143 goes on to remove the conditional phrase and come to, “…death and resurrection is special to the beloved son and at the same time normative.”

Given the difficulty we have in our own journey to wilderness belovedness, this same teaching returns in 9:31 and 10:32-34.