Jesus, Disciple of the Kingdom: Mark's Christology for a Community in Crisis

Jesus, Disciple of the Kingdom

Mark’s Christology for a Community in Crisis

Osvaldo D. Vena

With a Foreword by Ched Myers

Jesus, Disciple of the Kingdom

Mark’s Christology for a Community in Crisis

Copyright © 2014 Osvaldo D. Vena. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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isbn 13: 978-1-61097-940-5

eisbn 13: 978-1-63087-373-8

Cataloging-in-Publication data:

Vena, Osvaldo D.

Jesus, disciple of the kingdom : Mark’s christology for a community in crisis / Osvaldo D. Vena ; with a foreword by Ched Myers.

xvi + 206 pp. ; 23 cm—Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

isbn 13: 978-1-61097-940-5

1. Jesus Christ—History of doctrines—Early church, ca. 30–600. 2. Bible. N.T. Mark—Criticism, interpretation, etc. I. Title.

BS2585.52 V45 2014

Manufactured in the USA

To my wife Patricia

and my sons Matías and Julián,

companions in the journey of discipleship

Foreword

by Ched Myers

It is both curious and revealing that academic studies of Mark so rarely focus on the theme of discipleship.¹ Curious, because discipleship is so unarguably the central theme of the Gospel of Mark, regardless of reading strategy or exegetical method. Revealing, because it shows how wide the gulf between the seminaries, the sanctuaries and the streets has become in North America.

Osvaldo Vena’s study is an exception to this lamentable rule. As a child of liberation theology, he is suspicious of presumptions of scholarly insularity or objective aloofness. Nor does he accept the balkanization of critical analysis, genuine faith and social commitment. Vena understands that the ideology of discipleship narrated in the Markan text cannot ultimately be untangled from questions about contemporary Christian practice. The endless discussion among First World academics about the true identity of the historical Jesus, he rightly complains, serves mostly to contribute to a generalized confusion about who Jesus really was while distracting us from engaging how we are to live as disciples in our historical context.

Meanwhile, in our North American Protestant churches, the prevailing expressions of faith—evangelical decisionism, mainline denominationalism and fundamentalist dogmatism—are each deeply problematic in a society that is mired in dysfunctional politics, delusion economics and a distractive culture. Faith as discipleship remains the road rarely taken here at the heart of empire. We have yet truly to reckon with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s famous warning, delivered under the shadow of fascism, that cheap grace is grace without discipleship.²

More than a half century ago the great Swiss New Testament scholar Eduard Schweizer reiterated Bonhoeffer’s dictum by asserting that from the perspective of Mark’s gospel, discipleship is the only form in which faith in Jesus can exist.³ This theological challenge was subsequently advanced by Schweizer’s Australian student Athol Gill, whose teaching of Mark as a manifesto of radical discipleship helped animate renewal movements between the seminary, sanctuary and streets in the 1970s and 80s across the English-speaking world.⁴ Vena, it seems to me, stands squarely in the anti-triumphalist theological tradition of Bonhoeffer, Schweizer, and Gill when he argues that Mark is more about discipleship, that is, suffering discipleship, than it is about Christology, that is, exalted Christology; it is more about who is a true disciple than it is about who is the real Messiah.

Mark is, according to the argument of this book, a creative and innovative Christologist who contributed two crucial concepts that have shaped Christian theology and praxis for the last 2,000 years: the idea of discipleship, which refers to the relationship between the believers and Jesus, and the Son of Man metaphor, which talks about the relationship between Jesus and the community of believers. Vena illuminates both concepts, and connects them by exploring how the Son of Man rubric in Mark can (and should) be understood through the hermeneutical key of discipleship. Jesus’ call to the Way of the cross—which Vena recognizes stands at the literary and ideological center of Mark—recontextualizes Daniel’s apocalyptic vision of nonviolent resistance. The communal suffering of the faithful will be vindicated by divine justice, and is thus revealed as redemptive.

Vena’s project is not promoting a low Christology, as some defenders of ecclesial orthodoxy will inevitably charge. Rather he seeks to re-ground christological discourse (in which, he affirms, every believing community must engage) in the prototype of Jesus’ own discipleship. In this he stays true to the Latin American commitment to the primacy of praxis. This focus also challenges the longstanding docetic tendency in North Atlantic Christology to be preoccupied with ontological debates. This volume also includes a creative attempt to appreciate the longer ending of Mark, using it as an example of how Christological imagination changes under shifting historical pressures. Whether or not Vena’s model will succeed in bridging the gap between Christus Victor and traditional Suffering Servant atonement Christologies remains to be seen. But this book will surely help seminary and sanctuary return to the roots of the gospel tradition by re-centering the call to discipleship—Jesus’ and ours.

Mark wrote to help imperial subjects (in the first century and today) learn the hard truth about our world and our selves. This story of Jesus does not pretend to represent the Word of God dispassionately or impartially; it was written by, about, and for those engaged in God’s work of justice, compassion, and liberation in the world. To the otherworldly religious, Mark’s Jesus offers no signs from heaven (Mark 8:11–12). To scholars who refuse to commit themselves concerning the life and death issues of the day, Jesus declines engagement (11:30–33). But to those willing to risk the wrath of empire, Jesus offers the Way of discipleship (8:34ff.)—which Way he not only proclaims, but embodies, thus empowering us to follow. This is the old story, Vena argues, and its time has come again.

References

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. The Cost of Discipleship. New York: Macmillan,

1966

.

Gill, Athol. Life on the Road. Dandenong, Australia: UNOH Publishing,

2009

.

Myers, Ched. Who Will Roll Away the Stone: Discipleship Queries for First World Christians. Maryknoll: Orbis,

1994

.

Neville, David, ed. Prophecy and Passion: Essays in Honour of Athol Gill. Adelaide: Australian Theological Forum,

2002

.

Schweizer, Eduard. Lordship and Discipleship. Studies in Biblical Theology

28

. London: SCM,

1960

.

Segovia, Fernando, ed. Discipleship in the New Testament. Philadelphia: Fortress,

1985

.

1. Though see Segovia, Discipleship in the New Testament.

2. Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship.

3. Schweizer, Lordship and Discipleship.

4. See Gill, Life on the Road. See also Neville, Prophecy and Passion. It was partly through Gill’s work that I came to both Christian activism and the study of Mark (for more on the First World radical discipleship movement see Myers, Who Will Roll Away the Stone). Between the seminary, sanctuary and streets is the tag line we used to describe the social location of a U.S. experiment in alternative theological education for activists we founded in

2001

, called the Word and World People’s School (see www .wordandworld.org).

Preface

Jesus was not a celebrity, but his contemporaries, and those who came after them, made him into one. His town’s people were the first to capitalize on the notoriety of the prophet from Galilee. His disciples and followers did the same. After the resurrection, the early Jesus movement needed to counteract Jesus’ negative celebrity status, earned by his execution on a Roman cross, and so believers took to the task of writing apologetic works, including the gospels, pointing at the empty tomb and the resurrection appearances as proof that God had vindicated Jesus’ life and ministry. This, in turn, laid the foundation for what was to come, namely, the elevating of Jesus of Nazareth to the position of Lord of the universe, Christus Victor, Savior of the world, and Eschatological Judge.

For millennia, the official church has expropriated and misinterpreted Jesus’ true vocation and message in order to build itself into an institution that, to this very day, has controlled the way Jesus is understood by the majority of Christians. The church has dictated the content of Christology in order to achieve the church’s broad and long-lasting goals of self-preservation and theological hegemony. Some of the social ramifications of this Christology, just to mention a few, are: the subordination of women and their exclusion from positions of leadership in the church; the glorification of redemptive suffering, which justifies violence perpetrated against women and sexual and racial minorities; the glorification of redemptive violence, which justifies war, colonization, and genocide in the name of a supposedly sacred mission to Christianize the world. The list can continue endlessly, but these are sufficient to prove my point, which is that the content of Christology has lasting ethical implications. Or to put it in other words: Christology and social practice are intricately related.

In this book, I try to take a critical view of the church’s Christology and suggest an alternative way of looking at Jesus from the perspective of a community, Mark’s, which could be considered pre-church and pre-institution, even though the signs of institutionalization are beginning to surface. It is a way to envision and imagine a different kind of church and, therefore, a different kind of Christianity, not unlike the one envisioned by the Gnostics of the second century or the Jewish Christians of the first. It represents a bold deviation from the norm and a desire to make Jesus’ words and ministry consistent with and relevant to the community’s context, both ancient and modern.

I am grateful to all those people—colleagues, church members, friends, and family members—who have been conversation partners through all the years during which this idea was conceived and brought to fruition. They have been instrumental in the idea’s coherence and validity, which the reader will have to evaluate on his or her own terms. I am especially indebted to Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary for granting me a leave of absence to complete this work. I am also grateful to my research assistant, Kerri Allen, and my teaching assistant, Melanie Baffes—both doctoral students at Garrett—for their invaluable work of editing and formatting the final manuscript.

Finally, I offer this book to all those who have felt uncomfortable with the church’s view of Jesus of Nazareth, and I thereby suggest a new way of looking at him—as the disciple par excellence of the kingdom of God, a model for our daily, contemporary journey as God’s people.

Osvaldo D. Vena

March 2013

Abbreviations

BDAG Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature

Bib Biblica

BR Biblical Research

BTB Biblical Theology Bulletin

CBQ Catholic Biblical Quarterly

HCSB The HarperCollins Study Bible

JSNTSup Journal for the Study of the New Testament: Supplement Series

JBL Journal of Biblical Literature

PSB Princeton Seminary Bulletin

RevistB Revista Bíblica

SNTSMS Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series

TDNT Theological Dictionary of the New Testament

Introduction

I begin this work with the assumption that Christologies¹ are not given revelations or spontaneous historical manifestations but rather community-constructed models, that is, ways of talking about Jesus that are born out of a community’s theological identity. There are some good reasons that a given community ascribed to Jesus different titles and roles. For example, it is very interesting to note the way Paul talks about Jesus and the way Mark does; or the way the authors of Ephesians and Colossians talk about Christ as compared to the way Paul describes him. Each Christological description is different because the make-up and situations of the communities are different. This cannot be overstated. Christology is always driven and fed by the praxis of the community.² It is not a given. It has to be constructed. It is never deductive, but inductive. It is never from above, a revelation implanted in people’s minds and heart by God, but always from below, from the human sphere where people struggle to remain faithful to God. Christology then is not an abstract, value-free reflection³ about who Jesus is but a practical response of the faithful done from the perspective of interested discipleship. Here I agree with Terrence W. Tilley, who proposes that Christology "must begin where we are. . . . Christology always arises in disciples’ imagination. We start with Jesus as he is perceived and imagined on this earth. We start telling the story here even if the story we tell begins in heaven."⁴ This starting point of Christology is made even more poignant by Jon Sobrino:

[We] will give preference to the praxis of Jesus over his own teaching and over the teaching that the New Testament theologians elaborated concerning his praxis. Thus the New Testament will be viewed primarily as history and only secondarily as doctrine concerning the real nature of that history.⁵

Starting the Christological task deeply embedded in the praxis of the community is something advanced by Liberation Theology and nicely summarized in Gustavo Gutierrez’s famous dictum concerning the relationship between theology and praxis: Theology follows, he says, it is the second step.⁶ I treat Christology as a subset of theology,⁷ namely, the discourse⁸ about Jesus as Christ, so the dictum still applies. This second-step characteristic of any theology explains very well the process by which the New Testament books were written, as well as any contemporary reflection on these texts. What comes first is an experience with God channeled through and rooted in a historical event, namely, the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. The second step is the discourse we construct, from the practice of discipleship,⁹ about who this Jesus was/is and therefore who we are as God’s people on earth. Since there are a variety of practices of discipleship due to the fact that we are all immersed in different contexts and social locations, there will always be a variety of Christological affirmations that need to be seen not so much as competitive but as complementary. They need to be brought into dialogue so that each one of our communities may contribute to the other a new insight that can be used in the practice of discipleship. The goal here is not orthodoxy, an agreement on the right doctrines, but orthopraxis, a strategy for knowing what the right practice is in a given context.

As the New Testament clearly shows, this process of Christology-building started in the early years of the movement, even before followers were called Christians.¹⁰ One of the first, and perhaps most influential Christologists,¹¹ was indeed the Apostle Paul. Furthermore, this process can also be found in the Markan community, as its members struggled to find their place as followers of Jesus of Nazareth in a conflicting and changing world. But I would argue that in Mark’s community, the Christology that developed was less exalted, and certainly less apocalyptic, than the one manifested in and by the Pauline communities.

The essence of my argument is that of trying to find support for a Christology that sees in Jesus the disciple par excellence (chapters 3 and 4). This is not going to be an easy task, for Jesus is usually seen as the teacher, the Messiah, the Son of God, etc., rather than as a disciple. I would contend that this might be precisely one of the reasons the church has often failed in its work of proclamation of the good news, namely a mistaken understanding of Jesus’ identity and mission, which in turn impacted the way the church has understood itself and its own mission. If we can get back to a pre-Christian, or pre-canonical understanding of Jesus ministry,¹² as preserved by one community, Mark’s, then perhaps we can find a way of being the church that is more in tune with God’s redemptive mission in the world.

Since this is more a socio-rhetorical¹³ than a historical-critical investigation my search for a discipleship model is done at the level of the text.¹⁴ This means that historical insights into the possibility of seeing Jesus as a disciple of the kingdom are limited to a general background. Rather, the text is explored, looking for clues that may help us build the proposed model. But insights from the historical-critical methods, especially those of redaction and source criticism, are brought into the discussion in order to clarify and interpret the world of the NT writers in general and Mark in particular.

The Need for a New Model

According to Philip F. Esler,¹⁵ a model is a heuristic tool, allowing comparisons to be made with the texts for the purpose of posing new questions to them. The texts must supply the answers, not the model. . . . For this reason, it is inappropriate to debate whether a model is ‘true’ or ‘false,’ or ‘valid’ or ‘invalid.’ What matters is whether it is useful or not. Therefore, Christologies are more relevant for their consequences, their social repercussions, than for their content. For example, Mark’s Christology may have seemed flawed to some (especially Matthew and Luke, who added to it!) but it was useful to the community that produced it. The same could be said about Paul’s Christology and ours.

The traditional, and I would say orthodox,¹⁶ descriptions (or models) of Jesus as Messiah, Son of God, and Savior tend to confine him to ethnical, religious and metaphysical descriptions that alienate those who want to find in him an example for Christian living and praxis.¹⁷ Something similar happens with the roles of prophet and servant. The first one could be interpreted too narrowly in terms of gender (most of Israel’s prophets were men), and the second may send the wrong message to those people in society who already have a secondary position, such as women and ethnic minorities. For people whose lives are defined by continuous and ill-rewarded service, the description of Jesus as the ideal servant is not very comforting.¹⁸

We need a more inclusive and liberating model, one that can speak to people who have always felt that the Jesus proclaimed by the kerygma is too divine, too out of touch with reality. Often this Jesus seems to be playing a game called Now I’m human, now I’m not. For just when one begins to identify with a down-to-earth Jesus, the one who eats with sinners and publicans, who is thirsty and asks water from a woman in Samaria, who cries in front of the tomb of his friend Lazarus, the game changes. Now Jesus is divine, the Son of God, the agent of God’s final kingdom, an almost unreachable character who predicts his death to the last detail, forewarns his followers of the impending coming of the last days, and ascends to heaven in a cloud, as two heavenly figures tell the perplexed disciples that one day he will return in the same way as he now ascends. The game of biblical chess ends in a tie when the Orthodox Church, meeting at Chalcedon in 451 CE proclaims that Jesus was fully human and fully divine. That may have worked in the fifth century. but not so well in the twenty-first century. Thus, Jesus of Nazareth is made into this impossible entity who can only inhabit the world of theological and abstract thought, but never (or seldom) the real world of contemporary women and men, who have a difficult time identifying with someone who is not completely one of them.¹⁹

The Jesus who has been proclaimed by the various historical-Jesus researchers has also alienated people both in the church and in society at large, for this Jesus seems to be the product of liberal Christianity (Jesus the charismatic genius and great hero), or of scientific, and thus positivist, investigation that sees in Jesus a healer, preacher of renewal, cynic, and so on, who is at odds with the Judaism of his time. The problematic images of Jesus coming from these different quests have been addressed in depth by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza in her book, Jesus and the Politics of Interpretation. She advocates for an ethics of interpretation that recognizes that any presentation of Jesus, whether religious or scientific, is really a reconstruction done with the tools available to the researcher that condition the results of the investigation. She says:

[An] ethics of interpretation seeks to analyze the nexus between reconstructions of the Historical-Jesus and those theoretical, historical, cultural, and political conceptual frameworks that determine Jesus research. Hence biblical scholarship . . . must learn to understand itself as a critical rhetorical practice which carefully explores and assesses its own impregnation with hegemonic knowledge and discursive frameworks that made sense of the world and produce what counts as reality or as common sense.²⁰

Yes, we need a new model, and I would like to suggest that this model is one that sees in Jesus the ideal disciple of the kingdom.²¹ What would it mean to see Jesus, in the Gospel of Mark primarily, but also in the other gospels, as the supreme example of discipleship? Among other things, it requires a rereading of the titles and roles traditionally associated with him—Son of man, Son of God, Son of David, Messiah, prophet, etc.—from the perspective of Jesus’ own sense of discipleship as interpreted by Mark. What would be the implications of such a reading for Christology, theology, ecclesiology and, especially, for Christian praxis? How would the Jesus that comes out of such a reading be regarded by the institutionalized church, by the guild of Biblical Studies, by everyday, real flesh-and-blood Christians,²² and by those outside of the church? In the present work, I concentrate mainly on exploring the possibility²³ of constructing such a model given the textual data of the Gospel of Mark and I hint briefly at the ramifications of such a proposal in the life of the church.

The need to see Jesus as the example of true discipleship grows directly out of my own journey²⁴ in the Christian faith. I reached a point where theories of atonement and heavenly rewards became totally irrelevant for my life, and Jesus’ question in Mark, Who do you say that I am, now personalized as What does Osvaldo think that I am? ²⁵ was asked anew. It is the Christological question. And the only answer that made sense to me²⁶ was that Jesus is the supreme example for a life of discipleship that is understood as the construction of a new order,²⁷ a new society. And I found ample justification for this new understanding in the Markan story of Jesus. The metaphor that I like to use is that of Jacob wrestling with the man at Peniel in Genesis 32:26. When the man (angel?) wanted to leave, Jacob said: I will not let you go, unless you bless me. My hermeneutical struggle with the text has resulted, in the end, in blessing. But like Jacob after the encounter with God disguised as an angel, I am not the person I used to be. My theological walk has changed. Now I am limping, forever affected by the encounter, and people, especially traditional Bible scholars, notice it. My walking is irregular because it acknowledges the paradoxes of life and the way they affect the interpretation of the text. Now my social location precedes me as I delve into the text in search for answers.²⁸

Such an endeavor is a reconstruction, or better yet, a construction.²⁹ It is not offered so it will replace other constructions, but in the hope that it will contribute to a host of other images and views of Jesus that have been proposed throughout history. My only ethical exigency is that the model I propose will result in liberation, giving of life instead of taking it away from people. This general goal is unpacked by Schüssler Fiorenza when she says that any historical-Jesus research should be mindful of not reinscribing, in and through its scholarly discourse, the anti-Judaism inscribed in the gospels; that it should consider how much it has contributed to the liberation or oppression of women and other minorities around the world; that it should criticize the ideologies of colonization and domination that often use the biblical text as justification for their colonial agenda; and that it should assess whether or not it promotes a politics of exclusivity, inferiority, prejudice, and dehumanization when it comes to cultural or religious identity formation.³⁰ Furthermore, my model has to prove that it can coexist peacefully with these four areas of concern. At the end of the book, I evaluate whether or not this has been the case.

Challenges to the Present Work

To speak of Jesus as disciple presents us with many challenges. First and foremost, there is the text of the New Testament: in no place does Jesus speak of himself—nor is spoken of by others—as a disciple of anybody.³¹ Jesus is either the teacher, the Lord, the Logos, one with the Father and so on. Therefore, searching for this model will prove to involve a bit of detective work. We have to look at passages³² where Jesus is functioning as a disciple or is speaking of himself in discipleship categories, or using terms such as servant³³ or slave that present him in a less exalted manner. These representations will have to be seen as synonymous or similar to discipleship, if not historically at least theologically and literarily. In that sense, Lone Fatum has said:

A Gospel text may seem descriptive or narrative; in effect, however, it is prescriptive, as we know, and its purpose is to demonstrate to its Christian audience what it means to believe in Christ and to live the social lives of committed Christians. This implies that Jesus does not appear in the various texts as a human being or as a historical person of individual quality, but rather as the Christ of a particular congregation. Jesus as well as the people around him are actors in the reality of the text, and we know them only as such. We meet them playing their parts in the adaptation of Christian meaning that is the deliberate purpose of the text. In other words, in a particular Gospel text both Jesus and the people around him are bearers of just those symbolic values on which the universe of Christian plausibility is structured and meant to be sustained