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1 Samuel 8:4-11, (12-15), 16-20, (11:14-15) The people ask Samuel for a king. Samuel warns them that they don’t know what they are asking.

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Genesis 3:8-15 Adam and Eve hiding in the garden.

Psalm 138 All the kings of the earth shall praise you…

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Psalm 130 Out of the depths I cry…

2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1 So we do not lose heart…what cannot be seen is eternal.

Mark 3:20-35 – The crowd was so large, they couldn’t eat. His family came out to restrain him, for the people said he was out of his mind. Can Satan cast out Satan? A house divided cannot stand. Those who do God’s will are my brother, sister and mother.

Artwork

“The Siege of Jerusalem”, by Ercole de Roberti; “Adam and Eve Hiding”, by George Frederick Watts; “Michael Binding Satan”, by William Blake

In last week’s blog for Holy Trinity I shared a lens through which I initially view/read each Gospel. The premise was that they are all “intra-Jewish” arguments/apologies that deal with questions of what it meant to follow Messiah Jesus. 1st century “Christian’s” existed as a sect within Judaism and continued to live and synagogue with Jews that did not recognize Jesus as Messiah. As stated, I believe that in Mark’s world, with the temple in ruins and death all around following Titus’ sack of Jerusalem in 70 CE, the issue is, “In the midst of crucifixions, why follow a crucified Messiah? Can there even be such a thing as a crucified Messiah? Isn’t that an oxymoron?”

Mark 13, “The Little Apocalypse,” has always set off all sorts of  eschatological speculation among the pre-millennialists, post-millennialists, dispensationalists, and so forth. I never had much time for any of it nor understood much of it. My response to such speculation is, “So what? What am I supposed to do with all that?” But, more importantly, I think it’s all just a huge misinterpretation of Mark. If you will excuse the word play, I think it’s more of a “scatological” than an “eschatological” reading; it robs the text of its context.

Yes, it is about “the end of the world,” but not an end yet to come. It has already come. Mark writes at the end of the world. Mark writes to people caught in death, destruction, and despair. The destruction of Jerusalem, the razing of the temple, the Diaspora, and thousands taken back to Rome as slaves was “the end of the world” for the Jewish people. I am reminded of Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach.” The final stanza:

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

It doesn’t matter what’s going on somewhere else if the world is collapsing around you. The sun shining someplace else doesn’t help your “darkling plain.” Mark writes at and to “the end of the world.”

When the elders told Samuel, ” Give us a king to rule over us.” Samuel gave them the Lord’s warning about kings and the oppression they will bring,

“These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons… He will take your daughters… He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards… He will take your male and female slaves, and the best of your cattle and donkeys… He will take one-tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves; but the Lord will not answer you in that day.”

What I hear is, “Be careful for what you ask. A king will be the end of the world as you have known it.” I hear the same message in Genesis 3: “Be careful of your quest for power – ‘you shall be like God’ – because you may discover it to be the end of the world that you have known.”

Again, Mark’s context: Amid all of this death that has been brought by the kings – the christs, messiahs, caesars, and emperors of this world – who have ended our world, of what use is a “King of the Jews” who cannot even “save himself?”

A book by Chad Meyers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus makes some sense of Jesus’ parable for me. A review and précis of the book can be found here. From the précis:

“It seems to make no sense unless, says Myers, we read it as a symbol of what Jesus is attempting to do by his nonviolent direct action against Roman imperialism and the temple establishment. Mark is attempting to show that Jesus is the one who “binds the strong man” and ransacks his house (i.e. overturns the oppressive sociopolitical and religious order) through a nonviolent direct action campaign, and the simultaneous establishment of a new social order, not ruled by, or rooted in, oppressive forces.”

I Googled the phrase “the family church” and got 151,000,000 results in .29 seconds. I think I know what churches are trying to say when they market themselves in that way. I’ll abide the 8th commandment and put “the best possible construction” on it; but, I think it also contains an oblique message that, in the end, offers little “certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.” And, more importantly, it is a marketing strategy that flies in the face of Mark 3:31-35. In Messiah Jesus there is the establishment of a new social order; not a “new and improved” version of the old social order. That, I believe, is the linkage within the text.

And so, what to preach? Well, this is a dangerous text if you don’t want to ruffle any feathers. I think the need is to “bring it home.” From the blog, Jesus Radicals:

“That terrible abuse of power that is power’s dark specter and lethal shadow” manifests itself also in “society in miniature,” namely in the family, in our friendships and partnerships, in our most intimate relationships. The “strong man’s house” is certainly the White House, the Pentagon, the Vatican, the New York Stock Exchange [or any other place of worldly power] ; but it is not only these. The strong man’s house might also be our own home where we live with those whom we love. It may be our parish, our religious community, our neighborhood association, our peace group…anywhere power is abused is the strong man’s house and there will be no peace in that house until the strong man is bound.

A good hymn of the day might be “O Christ, what can it mean for us?” ELW 431.

This week, may you and your house be at peace.

Don Carlson, Assistant to the Bishop