Mark 14:12-16

In Mark (followed by Matthew and Luke), the meal Jesus shares with his disciples is a Passover meal. In John, it is not. Rather, Thursday is the day before Passover, and the lambs to be eaten at the Passover meal on Friday evening will be killed on Friday afternoon, at about the same hour Jesus dies on the cross.

The reason for John’s dating seems to be theological: Jesus is the new Passover lamb.

In Mark nine verses are devoted to Jesus’s last gathering with his disciples, in John five chapters, often called “Jesus’s Farewell Discourse.”

In Mark (again followed by Matthew and Luke) Jesus speaks the words that, in slightly varying forms, have become central to Christian celebration of the Lord’s Supper (Eucharist, Mass, or Communion): “This is my body, this is my blood.” Johns says nothing about this. Instead, John has the story of Jesus washing the feet of his disciples.

“Maundy Thursday” is based on John’s story: “Maundy” derives from the Latin word for the “mandate” — the new commandment — that Jesus gives his followers in John 13:34: “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”

Back to Mark… the details in this passage recall the preparations for Jesus’s entry into the city on Palm Sunday, but in this case the preplanning has to do with secrecy.

The Last Supper: A Web Of Meanings

• Mark 14:17-25
• Three main elements in Mark’s story of the Last Supper: (page 90)
• 1. they eat the Passover meal together
• 2. Jesus speaks of his imminent betrayal
• 3. Jesus invests the bread and wine with meanings associated with his impending death
• “The theme of failed discipleship continues to be central; more than half of Mark’s narration of Thursday evening and night is devoted to it.” (page 90)

Four rich meanings of the final meal that Jesus shared with his disciples. (page 91)

• A Continuation of the Meal Practice of Jesus
• “According to the gospels, including Mark, shared meals were one of the most distinctive features of Jesus’s public activity.”
• “The issue is that Jesus eats with ‘undesirables,’ the marginalized and outcast, in a society in which the people with whom one shared a meal was hugely significant.”
• “They were real meals, not a morsel and a sip as in our observance of the Eucharist. For Jesus, real food — bread — mattered.”
• “For Jesus’s peasant audience, bread — enough food for the day — was one of the two central survival issues of their lives (the other was debt).
• An Echo of the Feeding of the Five Thousand
• “As Mark narrates what Jesus did at the Last Supper, he uses four verbs: took, blessed, broke, and gave. These four key words refer us back to an earlier scene concerning food in Mark, in which Jesus feeds five thousand people with a few loaves and fishes.” (page 91)
• Why this cross-reference from the Last Supper back to the loaves-and-fishes meal?
• Mark’s story of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes begins by establishing two divergent solutions to a hunger situation.
• The disciples: Send them away so they can get something to eat
• Jesus: You give them something to eat
• Jesus forces them to participate step by step as intermediaries in the entire process. (page 92)
• “The point of this story is not multiplication, but distribution. The food already there is enough for all when it passes through the hands of Jesus as the incarnation of divine justice. The disciples — think of them as the already present kingdom community in microcosm, or as the leaders of that community — do not see that as their responsibility and are forced to accept it by Jesus.” (page 92)
• “Mark’s emphasis on a just distribution of what does not belong to us in the incident of the loaves and fishes links, therefore, to the emphasis on the ‘loaf of bread’ and the ‘cup of wine’ that are shared among all at the New Passover meal.” (page 92)
• A Passover Meal
• The first Passover (Exodus 12) occurred on the evening before the tenth plague to strike Pharaoh and Egypt, namely, the death of the firstborn in every household in Egypt. (page 93)
• “The Passover lamb was thus also food for the journey. Moreover, the first Passover was also the last supper in Egypt, the land of bondage. We note that the Passover lamb is a sacrifice in the broad sense of the word, but not in the narrow sense of substitutionary sacrifice. Its purpose is twofold: protection against death and food for the journey.” (page 93)
• “For the empire of Pharaoh, substitute the Roman Empire or any other empire, and the subversive nature of this story is not difficult to discern.” (page 93)
• Body and Blood and the Death of Jesus
• “Mark’s story of the Last Supper leaves the connections to Passover implicit. What it makes explicit is the connection to Jesus’s impending death.” (page 93)
• Noting the differences between Mark, Matthew and Luke about the words of the Last Supper, the authors write “The different versions indicate a degree of fluidity in how the Last Supper was remembered and celebrated. What they all have in common, however, is an emphasis on body and blood, bread and wine.” (page 94)
• What, then is Mark adding here that was not present before?
• “First, the point of Jesus’s meals — from the loaves-and-fishes ones to the bread-and-wine one — is to insist on shared meals as the mandate of divine justice in a world not our own.” (page 94)
• “The language of body and blood points to a violent death. When a person dies nonviolently we speak of a separation of body and soul. But when a person dies violently we speak of a separation of body and blood. That is the first and basic point of Jesus’s separated bread/body and wine/blood words.” (page 95)
• Another level of meaning in Mark. “It would never have been possible to speak of Jesus’s death as a blood sacrifice unless, first, it had been a violent execution. But, granted that fate, a correlation becomes possible between Jesus as the new paschal lamb and this final meal as a New Passover.” (page 95)
• Writing again about participation, the authors write, “Finally, Jesus does not merely speak of bread and wine as symbols of his body and blood. Rather, he has all the Twelve (including Judas!) actually partake of the food and drink — they all participate in the bread-as-body and blood-as-wine. It is, as it were, a final attempt to bring all of them with him through execution to resurrection, through death to new life. It is, once again, about participation in Christ and not substitution by Christ.” (page 95)
• “The Last Supper is about bread for the world, God’s justice against human injustice, a New Passover from bondage to liberation, and participation in the path that leads through death to new life.” (page 95)

Gethsemane, Prayer, and Arrest

• Mark 14:26-52
• “The prayer is remarkable both for its way of addressing God and its content. Jesus calls God abba, an Aramaic word that Mark includes even though he is writing in Greek. In Aramaic, abba is the familiar or intimate form of ‘father,’ much like the English ‘papa.’ It is used by children to address their father not only as toddlers but also as adults.” (page 97)
• “The prayer reflects not a fatalistic resignation to the will of God, but a trusting in God in the midst of the most dire of circumstances.” (page 98)
• “It is instructive to compare Mark’s story of the arrest with John’s account. In Mark, Jesus is a vulnerable human being. In John, Jesus is in charge and is even acknowledged as a divine being by those who arrest him.” (page 98)
• “We have already mentioned how central the theme of failed discipleship is to Mark’s gospel and to Thursday in particular. Judas betrays Jesus, Peter denies him, and the rest flee. They now disappear from the story of Holy Week. Mark does not mention them again until Easter.” (page 100)

Interrogation and Condemnation

• Mark 14:53-65
• Some historical comments:
• Most likely, Mark (and other early Christians) did not know exactly what happened. (During the “hearing” or “trial.”) Thus the trial scene may represent a post-Easter Christian construction and not history remembered.
• It is unclear whether we should think of Mark as presenting a formal “trial” or an informal but deadly “hearing.”
• The temple authorities did not represent the Jews.
• Mark’s story of Jesus’s trial before the temple authorities has three stages:
• 1. testimony against Jesus in 14:55-59
• 2. witness by Jesus in 14:60-62
• 3. the verdict and abuse in 14:63-65
• “Under Jewish law, testimony was required from ‘two or three’ witnesses in order to convict. In the absence of witnesses who agree with each other, the high priest in effect goes for a confession, and the crucial interchange occurs.” (page 102)
• “His response begins with what is translated as a affirmation: ‘I am.’ But as briefly mentioned in Chapter 1, the Greek phrase ego eimi can be translated either as a declarative (and thus as an affirmation) or as an interrogative: ‘I am’ or “Am I?’ (page 102)
• Matthew and Luke both read it as ambiguous. Matthew has “You have said so” (26:64); Luke has “You say that I am” (22:70) (page 102)
• The rest of Jesus’s response shifts the topic to the “Son of Man”: “You will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Power,” and ‘coming with the clouds of heaven.'” “Note the single quotation marks within the double quotation marks; they indicate that Jesus’s response includes a quotation, specifically language from Daniel 7:13-14.
• “We need to pause and reflect on the significance of the shift from ‘the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed’ to ‘the Son of Man.’ Recall that when Peter confessed Jesus as the Messiah in Mark 8:29, Jesus did not deny it, but reinterpreted or replaced the title immediate with another one. (page 103)
• “Perhaps for Mark the title ‘Messiah’ presumed a leader who would use violence to liberate Israel from the military power of Roman oppression. That was not Mark’s vision of Jesus, so ‘Son of Man’ was his preferred replacement to avoid any ambiguity between a violent and nonviolent messiah.” (page 103)
• Mark’s quotation of Daniel 7 requires careful consideration.
• In 167 BCE the Syrian ruler Antiochus IV Epiphanes launches a religions persecution against Jews who refuse to be assimilated into his Hellenistic empire.
• Some Jews (whom we know as the Maccabees) fought a successful military war on earth against his empire
• Others turned to visions and hope for an absolute divine judgement against all empires past, present, and future
• In the vision recorded in Daniel 7, all the major empires, Babylonian, Medean, Persian, and Macedonian are envisaged as beasts
• The vision includes a trial, and the decision is the eventual destruction of these empires, their replacement is the what is described in Daniel 7:13-14.
• “The fifth and final empire is given not to one like a beast, but to one like a human being. The previous empires are symbolized by beasts, the kingdom of God by a human figure.” (page 104)
• “Daniel 7 is thus an anti-imperial vision and an anti-imperial text: the empires that have oppressed the people of God throughout the centuries are all judged negatively, and positive affirmation is given to the Son of Man, a symbol for the people of God, to whom is given the everlasting kingdom of God.” (page 104)
• “Jesus as the Son of Man must be read against the general background of Daniel 7. That usage has three interlinked aspects:”
• 1. Jesus as Son of Man with earthly authority
• 2. Jesus as Son of Man in death and resurrection
• 3. Jesus as Son of Man returning with heavenly power and glory
• “In other words, all is not future, but is rather a passage from present into future.” (page 105)
• The kingdom’s “presence is now known only to faith (1:15), but one day it will be revealed to sight (9:1).” (page 105)

Confession And Denial

• Mark 14:66-72
• The sequence of 14:53-72 is the last of the three framing units Mark created in recording the passion of Jesus.
• Incident A: Peter follows Jesus to the high priest’s house (14:53-54)
• Incident B: Jesus is interrogated and confesses his identity (14:55-65)
• Incident A: Peter is interrogated and denies Jesus (14:66-72)
• Peter is interrogated and responds with cowardice to unofficial bystanders. Jesus is interrogated and responds with courage to the official high priest (page 106)
• “The framing of Jesus’s confession by Peter’s denials offers those Christians a triple consolation”.
• First, those who imitate Jesus rather than Peter are applauded for their courage.
• Second, even those who imitate Peter rather than Jesus are consoled with the hope of repentance and forgiveness.
• Third, neither denials nor even betrayals are the worst sin against Jesus or God. The worst sin is despair — loss of faith that repentance will always, always obtain forgiveness.

Mark 14:1-11

Another Markian frame, this time in opposite and contrast.

• The need for a traitor: Mark 14:1-2
• The unnamed woman: Mark 14:3-9
• The advent of traitor: Mark 14:10-11
• “The literary contrast between the framed unit and the framing ones is between believer and traitor, but the depth of the Markian juxtaposition requires an understanding of what each person achieved within the sequence of Mark’s story about Jesus.” (page 71)
• It is easy to see why betraying Jesus represents the worst action possible, but why does anointing Jesus imply the best?

The Need For A Traitor

• “Why, if the Jewish crowd was so against Jesus, was it necessary to arrest him in the darkness of night with the help of a traitor from among Jesus’s followers?” (page 72)
• “The only reason given by Josephus for Antipas’ execution of John the Baptizer in his Jewish Antiquities is not the content of John’s message, but the size of John’s crowd.” (page 73)
• Borg & Crossan point out that Mark emphasized that the “ordinary” Jewish citizens, or the crowds, were not against Jesus, in fact they believed it to be the opposite, but that the Jewish leaders feared their support of Jesus. In Mark 14:1-2 it appears that the authorities have given up, there is no way to arrest Jesus unless they use stealth.
• “Do the other evangelists follow Mark’s emphasis? Less and less.” (page 74)
• “as we move sequentially from Mark through Matthew and Luke to John, that is, from the early 70s to the mid 90s CE, that original emphasis on Jewish supporting crowd versus Jewish high-priestly authority diminishes significantly.” (page 75)

The Twelve As Failed Disciples

• “as we shall see, Peter, James, and John, then the Twelve as a group, and finally Judas all fail tragically but not irrevocably (except for Judas) to accept their destiny alongside Jesus.” (page 75)
• “to be the Twelve (apostles or disciples) in Mark’s story is to fail Jesus badly.” (page 76)
• Mark makes this clear with his framing of the journey to Jerusalem with healings of blindness at the beginning and end of the journey.
• “Between those frames of blindness, Mark focuses the failed discipleship of the Twelve around three prophetic warnings of his death and resurrection given to them by Jesus.” (page 77)

First Prophecy, Reaction, And Response

• “Peter confesses that Jesus is the Messiah, but far from applauding him Jesus ‘sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him’ (8:29-30). Such injunctions to silence in Mark usually do not mean, “You have it right, but keep it secret,” but rather, “You have it wrong, so keep it quiet.” In other words, “Please, shut up!” (page 77)
• “Right after that wrong and silenced misunderstanding about Jesus as Messiah comes that correct and open announcement of Jesus as Son of Man.” The title of Son of Man will be discussed in more detail in chapter 5.
• “All three connected prophecies of death and resurrection beget at least incomprehension if not downright opposition from the Twelve.”
• “It is extremely important to underline Mark’s theology at this point. For him, Jesus knows in precise detail what is going to happen, but he does not speak of suffering vicariously to atone for the sins of the world.” (page 78)
• “To follow Jesus means to accept the cross, to walk with him against imperial violence and religious collaboration, and to pass through death to resurrection.”

Second Prophecy, Reaction, And Response

• “Even as Jesus is announcing his death buy execution, they are debating precedence among themselves. Here Mark is not only criticizing the disciples; he is almost lampooning them.” (page 79)

Third Prophecy, Reaction, And Response

• “Continues what we have called the Lenten journey theme as Jesus tries in vain not just to foretell but to explain his destiny to the disciples, so that they will be enabled to follow him on the way through death to resurrected life.” (Page 79)
• The third prophecy is the most detailed of the three. (page 80)
• the “three prophecies emphasize also that Jesus is calling all his followers — and not just the twelve disciples — to accept that communal destiny of death and resurrection.” (page 81)
• “that confrontation is with oppressive foreign empire (against violence) and its collaborative local religion (against injustice), that is to say, with any religio-political combination that establishes injustice on earth that belongs to a God of justice.” (page 81)
• “notice that in the first prophecy’s reaction and response Jesus was challenging them to die or at least be ready to die with him in Jerusalem. In the second and third ones, however, the emphasis is on how to behave — and behave as leaders — both now and hereafter.” (page 82)
• “The function of the three responses is to spell out in some detail what Jesus’s destiny of execution and resurrection means for himself, for the Twelve, and for all his followers.” (page 82)

Atonement: Substitution Or Participation?

• “It is probably fair to say that substitutionary atonement is the only way that many or even most contemporary Christians understand faith in the sacrificial and salvific death of Jesus.” (page 83)
• “The basic and controlling metaphor for that understanding of God’s design is our own experience of a responsible human judge who, no matter how loving, cannot legitimately or validly walk into her courtroom and clear the docket of all offenders by anticipatory forgiveness.” (page 83)
• “Notice, above all, how repeatedly Mark has Jesus insist that Peter, James, and John, the Twelve, and all his followers on the way from Caesarea Phillippi to Jerusalem must pass with him through death to a resurrected life.” (page 83)
• “For Mark, it is about participation with Jesus and not substitution by Jesus.”
• “And every year, our Lent asks us to repent, change, and participate in that transition with Jesus.” (page 84)
• “What about that climactic conclusion in Mark 10:45, which states that “the Son of Man came not be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many”?
• “The Greek word translated ‘ransom’ is lutron, which means the payment to an owner for a slave’s freedom or a captive’s ransom. It is not used in the Greek of the Hebrew Bible for anything like vicarious satisfaction or vicarious atonement to God for sin.”
• “How does Mark think Jesus’s death is a ‘ransom’ (lutron) for many? The Markan Jesus has been insisting on the ‘how’ ever since Caesarea Phillippi — to the Twelve in particular but also to all others as well. It is not by Jesus substituting for them, but by their participating in Jesus.” (page 84)

In Remembrance Of Her

• “Why does she deserve or her action receive this absolutely unique and stunningly extraordinary accolade from Jesus: ‘Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her'” (14:9) (page 85)
• “She alone, of all those who heard Jesus’s three prophecies of his death and resurrection, believe him and drew the obvious conclusion. Since (not if) you are going to die and rise, I must anoint you now beforehand, because I will never have a chance to do it afterward. She is, for Mark, the first believer. And she believed from the word of Jesus before any discovery of an empty tomb.” (page 85)
• “The unnamed woman is not only the first believer; she is also the model leader. Jesus has been telling the Twelve what leadership entails from Caesarea Phillippi to Jerusalem and has gotten nowhere with them.” (page 85)
• “The unnamed woman represents the perfect disciple-leader and is contrasted with Judas, who represents the worst one possible.” (page 86)

The Motive Of Judas

• Mark gives absolutely no hint of Judas’s motive in betraying Jesus. Mark, by the way, does not say that Judas did it for money, simply that they promised him some.
• “Mark’s emphasis is not on Judas’s motive, whatever it was, but on Judas’s membership in the Twelve.” (page 87)

“The traitor has entered into an agreement with those who collaborate with imperial rule. And so Wednesday ends and the plot has been set in motion.” (page 87)

Mark 11:20-25

Tuesday is the longest day in Mark’s story of Jesus’s final week.

• About two-thirds of Tuesday consists of conflict with temple authorities
• The remaining third warns of the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple and speaks of the coming of the Son of Man, all in the near future.

Jesus’s Authority Is Challenged

• Mark 11:27-33
• “They ask Jesus, ‘By what authority are you doing these things?’ The question refers to Jesus’s prophetic act in the temple on Monday, and Mark’s use of the plural ‘things’ suggests that Sunday’s provocative entry into the city may also be included.” (page 51)

Jesus Indicts The Authorities With A Parable

• Mark 12:1-12
• Jesus takes the initiative. Commonly called the parable of the wicked tenants, this story might better be called the parable of the greedy tenants.
• “The motivation for their murderous behavior is greed: they want to possess the produce of the vineyard for themselves.” (page 52)
• “Christian interpretation of this parable has most often emphasized a christological meaning.” but…
• “The primary meaning of the parable is not christological. Rather as Mark tells us at the very end of the story, it is an indictment of the authorities.” (page 52)
• “The tenants are not ‘Israel’ not ‘the Jews.’ Rather, the vineyard is Israel — both the land and its people. And the vineyard belongs to God, not to the greedy tenants — the powerful and wealthy at the top of the local domination system — who want its produce for themselves.” (page 53)

Taxes To Caesar?

• Mark 12:13-17
• “It has been most commonly understood to mean that there are two separate realms of human life, one religious and one political.” (page 54)
• “The heavy weight given to this verse as a solemn pronouncement about the relationship between religion and politics obscures what it means in Mark.” (page 54)
• “To imagine that their purpose is to provide a set of eternal truths about how human life should be ordered is to ignore the larger narrative of which they are a part.” (page 55)
• “Should we pay them (taxes to Caesar) or not?”
• It’s a volatile question.
• “The spokesmen of the authorities set the trap skillfully. Either answer would get Jesus in trouble.” (page 55) Either he
• Could be charged with sedition or,
• He risked discrediting himself with the crowd. “Most likely, this was the primary purpose of the question: to separate Jesus from the crowd by leading him into an unpopular response.” (page 55)
• As he did with the question about authority, he turns the situation back on his opponents.
• “Jesus’s strategy has led his questioners to disclose to the crowd that they have a coin with Caesar’s image on it. In this moment, they are discredited.” (page 56)
• “Thus, even before the famous words about rendering to Caesar, Jesus has won the encounter.” (page 56)
• “The second half of Jesus’s response is both evocative and provocative: “Give to God the things that are God’s. It raises the question, ‘What belongs to Caesar, and what belongs to God?” (page 56)
• “What belongs to Caesar? The implication is, nothing.” (page 57)

God Of The Dead Or Of The Living?

• Mark 12:18-27
• The Sadducees differed from the “chief priests, elders, and scribes” in two ways:
• They accepted only the “law,” the five books of Moses called the Torah as sacred scripture.
• They did not believe in an afterlife. (They did not believe there would be a resurrection of the dead.”
• The purpose of the resurrection of the dead was to redress human injustice: Jews who were faithful to God were being executed, and Jews who were willing to collaborate with Antiochus were being spared.
• “If you’re rich and powerful, who needs an afterlife?” (page 58)
• Levirate marriage: if a man dies before his wife has a child, then the man’s brother shall marry the widow and conceive an heir for the brother who died. (page 58)
• Does personal identity continue in a life after death, and do our relationships continue?
• Jesus’s response is threefold
• He charges the Sadducees with a deficient understanding of scripture and God
• He addresses the specific question: “When they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.” (12:25)
• Borg & Crossan say it is unclear to them what to make of this response.
• They suggest trying to discern a informative meaning may be a mistake
• Jesus refers to a passage from the book of Exodus, one of the books the Sadducess did regard as sacred scripture.
• Exodus 3:6
• “God is God not of the dead, but of the living. You are quite wrong.” (12:27)
• “For Jesus, the kingdom of God is not primarily about the dead, but about the living, not primarily about life after death, but about life in this world.” (page 60)

The Great Commandment

• Mark 12:28-34
• For the first and only time in this section of Mark, the theme of conflict disappears, and we have a story in which a connection is made between Jesus and an interrogator.
• “A request to provide a concise summary of what loyalty to God means was not unusual within Judaism, though teachers were not always ready to be brief.” (page 60)
• The two-fold great commandment — to love God and love our neighbor — is so familiar to us that it has become a Christian cliche. Miss the radical meaning of what Jesus is saying:
• “To love God above all else means giving to God what belongs to God: our heart, soul, mind, and strength. These belong to God, not Caesar.” (page 61)
• “To love one’s neighbor as one’s self means to refuse to accept the divisions rendered by the normalcy of civilization.”
• The scribe repeats what he heard and adds, “This is much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.”
• Thus the scribe brings up the contrast that dominates this section of Mark
• “He is not far from it because he knows its heart, but he is not in it. To be in it means more than knowing this. It means living it.” (page 62)

Jesus Challenges Scribal Teaching And Practice

• Mark 12:35-44
• Now (again) Jesus takes the initiative.
• “How can the scribes say that the Messiah is the son of David?” (page 63)
• The question challenges the teaching of the scribes that the Messiah is the son of David. But what does this mean?
• It might be about biological ancestry. It implies that Jesus is not of Davidic descent. This seems unlikely. The tradition that Jesus is a descendant of David is early, such as in Romans 1:3.
• “Some of Jesus’s contemporaries expected that the Messiah would be ‘son of David’ in the sense of being a king like David — a warrior who presided over Israel in the time of its greatest power and glory.” (page 63)
• “The message here then is that the Messiah will not be a king like David, not ‘son of David’ in this sense.”
• “The term ‘son David’ is not so much wrong as inadequate. The point, rather, is that the Messiah is David’s Lord — that is, greater than David, more than David, different from David.” (page 64)
• Next, Jesus indicts the self-important practice of the scribes. “… and yet, ‘They devour widows’ houses’ (12:40)
• How do they devour widows’ houses? Most likely this is in reference to the scribes’ activity as working for the wealthy, they would have administered loan agreements and then foreclosed on widows’ property when the loan could not be re-payed.
• Then we have the passage about the poor widow who puts in the temple treasury “all that she had.”
• This passage is commonly understood as contrasting the deep devotion of the poor widow with the public display of generosity of the wealthy.
• “An alternative interpretation hears the passage as a condemnation of the way the poor are manipulated to give all that they have to support the temple.” (page 64)

The Temple’s Destruction And Jesus’s Return

• Mark 13:1-4
• Jesus and the disciples are leaving the temple. One of them exclaims, “Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!” Jesus responds by telling them, “Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”
• Like the prophet Jeremiah six centuries earlier, Jesus speaks of the destruction of the temple, and of Jerusalem.
• “In an important sense, this passage is the climax of the series of conflicts between Jesus and the system of domination and collaboration centered in the temple. The judgement against what it had become pronounced by Jesus’s prophetic act in the temple on Monday is here explicitly articulated.” (page 65)
• The disciples then ask, “When will this be, and what will be the sign that all these things are about to be accomplished?” (page 65)

The Little Apocalypse

• Mark 13:5-37
• An apocalypse — the word means “revelation” or “unveiling” — is a kind of Jewish and Christian literature that reveals or unveils the future in language loaded with images and symbols.
• This is the longest single speech in Mark’s gospel.
• “At the center of the little apocalypse is an event described as ‘the desolating sacrilege set up where it ought not to be,’ followed by an aside to the reader, the only such remark in Mark, ‘Let the reader understand.'” (13:14)
• “Chapter 13 uses this language to speak of an event in Mark’s own time, namely, the conquest and destruction of Jerusalem and the temple by Rome in the year 70.” (page 68)
• The war began in the year 66 when the greatest of the Jewish revolts against Roman rule broke out.
• The desolating sacrilege — the destruction of the temple — is not the last word in this chapter. Jesus also speaks of “the coming of the Son of Man.” It also indicates a time, “But in those days, after that suffering,” (page 69)
• “It refers to a humanlike figure who comes to God and to whom God gives an everlasting kingdom.” (page 69)
• “To use later Christian language, this seems to be a ‘second coming’ of Jesus text. Mark expected this soon.”
• “In our judgement, Mark’s gospel expresses an intensification of apocalyptic expectation triggered by the great war.” (page 70)
• “But beneath Mark’s timetable, one may perceive a deeper meaning in his apocalyptic conviction. Namely, what has begun in Jesus will triumph, despite the tumult and resistance of this world.” (page 70)

“Tuesday has been a long day. By now, it is evening on the Mount of Olives. Darkness is coming on, a darkness that will deepen as the week continues to unfold. And as the darkness falls, Mark commends us, ‘Be alert! Stay awake! Watch!” (page 70)

Mark 11:12-19

Markan Frames

• Mark’s gospel often contains pairs of incidents that are intended to be interpreted in light of one another.
• How exactly do the framing of Incident A and the framed Incident B shed light on one another?
• An example: Mark 3:20-35
• Incident A: Mark 3:20-21. Jesus’s birth-family members are rejecting him as insane
• Incident B starts at Mark 3:22. The Scribes say he casts out demons in the name of Satan.
• Jesus’s rebuttal in Mark 3:24-25. The rebuttal points toward the framed “kingdom” or domain of Satan and toward the framing “house” or family of Jesus
• Incident A then picks back up at Mark 3:31-35
• Mark’s framing technique pushes hearers or readers to meditate deeply on the intercalation of those two dismissals by Jesus. “Think, it says, and keep on thinking.” (page 34)

From The Fig Tree Hear Its Lesson

• Incident A: Jesus sees a fig tree, doesn’t find figs on it, and pronounces a curse that it would never produce figs again, a curse the disciples hear. 11:12-14
• Incident B: The temple incident. 11:15-19
• Incident A conclusion: Jesus’s disciples see that the fig tree has withered away to its roots. 11:20-21
• Jesus cursing the fig tree is contradictory, and Mark points this out.
• It was March or April and there could never have been figs on that tree. Mark explicitly says this.
• On the other hand, Jesus is hungry, expects to find figs, and failing to do so curses the fig tree
• “The obvious contradiction between these two aspects of the incident is Mark’s way of warning us to take the event symbolically rather than historically.” (page 35)
• “The framing fig tree warns us that the framed temple is not being cleansed, but symbolically destroyed and that, in both cases, the problem is a lack of the ‘fruit’ that Jesus expected to be present.” (page 35)
• What exactly is wrong with the temple?

The Meaning Of Blood Sacrifice

• “Most people in the ancient world took blood sacrifice for granted as a normal or even supreme form of religious piety.” (page 36)
• Why?
• In order to eat meat or to have a feast you had to first kill and animal.
• Long before animal sacrifice was invented, human beings knew two basic ways of creating, maintaining, or restoring good relations with one another — the gift and the meal.
• Sacrifice as a gift to God, the animal was burned on the altar, totally destroying it.
• In sacrifice as meal, the animal was transferred to God by having its blood poured over the altar as then returned to the offerer as divine food for a feast with God.
• “In other words, the offerer did not so much invite God to a meal as God invited the offerer to a meal.” (page 36)
• Sacrifice: sacrum facere (Latin), “to make” (facere) “sacred” (sacrum)
• “In a sacrifice the animal is made sacred and is given to God as a sacred gift or returned to the offerer as a sacred meal. That sense of sacrifice should never be confused with either suffering or substitution.” (page 37)
• “Most Jews accepted blood sacrifice as a normal and normative component of divine worship at the time of Jesus. There is no reason to think that Jesus’s action in the temple was caused by any rejection of blood sacrifice, or indeed, had anything to do with sacrifice as such.” (page 38)

The Ambiguity Of The High-Priesthood

• “Today some Christian denominations have priests and some do not, but post-Reformation tensions over the clergy either as function or caste should not be retrojected into Jesus’s temple action.” (page 38)
• The Ambiguous status of the high-priesthood at the time of Jesus
• Jewish Hasmonean or Maccabean leaders, through successful wards against Syrian imperialism, had elevated their status to that of high priests and kings to become priest-kings. Normally there was a hereditary requirement for candidates for high-priests.
• Recall how the Romans divided territories of Israel amongst Herod’s children to rule in their place, but they appointed a governor, Pilot, to rule Judea, which contains Jerusalem.
• There was no longer a single hereditary dynasty that established the next high priest for life; instead there were those four major families competing with one another for appointment to that office.
• The governor hired and fired the high priest and will.
• How could a high priest negotiate with a governor who could fire him? It was a recipe for misrule. Hence the collaboration between the high-priest and the Roman governor.
• “It was possible to be against a particular high priest and the manner in which he was fulfilling his role without being against the office of high priest itself. There was a terrible ambiguity in that the priest who represented the Jews before God on the Day of Atonement also represented them before Rome the rest of the year.” (page 40)

The Ambiguity Of The Temple

• “That ambiguity of Judaism’s high priest as Rome’s primary local collaborator spilled over to the temple as well. That building was both the house of God on earth and the institutional seat of submission to Rome.” (page 40)
• After Herod rebuilt the platform of the temple and added the giant Court of the Gentiles, he placed a large golden eagle, symbol of Rome and its supreme divinity, Jupitor Optimus Maximus, at the top of one of its gates.
• Two Jewish teachers told their students to hack it off the wall since it was contrary to their sacred laws. They were executed, some burnt alive. These martyrs didn’t act against the temple, but against the ambiguity of the Roman eagle on the Jewish temple.
• This ambiguity went back over half a millenium before Jesus.

Jeremiah And The Temple

• “In Jeremiah 7 God tells Jeremiah to stand in front of the temple and confront those who enter to worship (7:1). About what? About their false sense of security.” (page 41)
• “Do you think, charges God through Jeremiah, that divine worship excuses you from divine justice, that all God wants is regular attendance at God’s temple rather than equitable distribution of God’s land?” (page 42)
• Jeremiah 7:5-7, 11
• “Den of robbers”: The people’s everyday injustice makes them robbers, and they think the temple is their safe house, den, hideaway, or place of security.” (page 42)
• “There was an ancient prophetic tradition in which God insisted not just on justice and worship, but justice over worship.” (page 42)
• Amos 5:21-24
• Hos. 6:6
• Micah 6:6-8
• Isaiah 1:11-17
• “What will happen if worship in the house of God continues as a substitute for justice in the land of God?” (page 43)
• Jeremiah 7:12-14
• Shiloh, which was destroyed by the Philistines, was the place were the ark of the covenant was enshrined in the tent of God before it was removed to the temple of God built by Solomon.

Jesus And The Den Of Robbers

• “The Temple incident involved both an action by Jesus and a teaching that accompanied and presumably explained it.” (page 44)
• The action, Jesus:
• began to drive out the buyers and sellers
• overturned the tables of the money changers
• overturned the seats of the dove sellers
• would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple
• “It means that Jesus has shut down the temple. But it is a symbolic rather than a literal ‘shutdown.'” (page 45)
• Recall the Markan frame of the fig tree and the temple set up earlier. (page 45)
• The tree was “shut down” for lack of the fruit Jesus demanded, and so was the temple.
• In the case of the temple, it is not a cleansing, but a symbolic destruction, and the fig tree’s fate emphasizes that meaning.
• The teaching:
• “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a den of robbers.” Mark 11:17
• Gospel footnotes usually indicate the sources as Isaiah 56:7, for the “house of prayer” part and Jeremiah 7:11 for the “den of robbers” part, but the former is given in quotation marks and the latter is not. In other words “den of robbers” is not indicated clearly as a quotation, and that has caused misunderstanding of Jesus’s action. “Den” is ignored and “robbery” is taken to refer to what is going on in the outer Court of the Gentiles
• “But clearly from the quotation’s context in Jeremiah 7 and 26, a “den” is a hideaway, a safe house, a refuge. It is not where the robbers rob, but where they flee to for safety after having done their robbing elsewhere.” (page 46)
• “But God is a God of justice and righteousness and when worship substitutes for justice, God rejects God’s temple — or, for us today, God’s church.” (page 46)

For All the Nations

• Distinction between what Jesus said and what Mark adds. Borg and Crossan say it’s difficult to imagine the historical Jesus using the Isaiah 56:7 quotation because he was standing in the Court of the Gentiles.
• “In the year 30 CE, therefore, neither Jesus nor anyone else could stand where the money changers sat and the pure animals were sold and say that the temple was not open to all people, that it was not “a house of prayer for all the nations.” (page 47)
• Mark is thinking not so much of Jesus around 30 CE as his own people forty years later.
• Mark is writing sometime after the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple in 70 CE, and explaining to Christian Jews why God allowed it to happen.
• “Between 67 and 70 the temple was certainly no longer open to ‘all the nations,’ but had become a stronghold for Zealot insurgents, a stronghold initially against their own Jewish aristocracy and eventually against the besieging Roman legions.

Twin Symbolic Actions

• Sunday’s demonstration occurs at the entrance to Jerusalem, and Monday’s at the entrance of the temple. For market these are not so much two separate incidents as a single double one.
• The structure of Sunday and Monday’s events are similar. (page 48)
• Mark 11:11 connects the two events, and it serves to emphasize that it also was a preplanned action.
• “Taken together, and they must be taken together, those action-word combinations proclaim the already present kingdom of God against both the already present Roman imperial power and the already present Jewish high-priestly collaboration. Jerusalem had to be retaken by a nonviolent messiah rather than by a violent revolution, and the temple ritual had to empower justice rather than excuse one from it. What is involved for Jesus is an absolute criticism not only of violent domination, but of any religious collaboration with it.” (page 49)

For Lent this year consider engaging your mind as well as your spirit in preparation for Holy Week by reading “The Last Week: What The Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Final Days In Jerusalem,” by Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan.

Using the gospel of Mark as their guide, Borg and Crossan present a day-by-day account of Jesus’s final week of life. They begin their story on Palm Sunday with two triumphal entries into Jerusalem. The first entry, that of Roman governor Pontius Pilate leading Roman soldiers into the city, symbolized military strength. The second heralded a new kind of moral hero who was praised by the people as he rode in on a humble donkey. The Jesus introduced by Borg and Crossan is this new moral hero, a more dangerous Jesus than the one enshrined in the church’s traditional teachings.

Seekers and Skeptics, Hope’s evening adult book discussion group will begin discussing The Last Week on Tuesday, March 4, and will discuss a chapter each week of Lent. You can join the discussion at 7 PM in the Senior High room of Hope’s education wing. Contact Frank McPherson if you have any questions.