In this solo-cast, Rev. Deborah Duguid-May explores the origins of Jesus as told in the Gospels of Mark and John, which do not have traditional birth narratives.
Transcript
Welcome! In this series Elizabeth and I have been doing on the Gospels and the differing birth narratives of Jesus, we focused on Matthew and Luke as contrast Gospels. One story told to an oppressed Judean population under military occupation, the other to wealthy Roman converts about this Palestinian Messiah. Each story shaped to its audience to be the transformative liberating news that particular community needs for salvation or wholeness.
So if you didn’t catch those episodes I encourage you to go back and listen to how Matthew and Luke are contrasting opposites of what is needed for liberation.
But in this episode I want to focus on Mark and John which, in their own way, are the other two contrasting narratives, and in this podcast look at these Gospels through a focus on class.
Mark’s Gospel is written around 65-75 AD, either in Rome or Syrian Palestine, after The Temple has been destroyed. He is writing to a mixed community of Jews and Gentiles, who were urban, lower to middle class, experiencing a lot of instability under Roman rule, and also persecution and social forms of exclusion. His readers were socially and economically vulnerable and used to being overlooked. There was a lot of suffering amongst his readers.
Now in Mark’s Gospel, some of you may be saying there is no birth narrative at all. True there isn’t. Mark doesn’t tell you anything about Jesus genealogy, about the angels, about a virgin birth, there is no Judean ancestry stories, no wise men, Herod or any political rulers and powers. But one thing I learnt from studying theology, is what is not spoken about is as important as what is. The things we don’t say and never mention are just as important and sometimes even more so than what is spoken about. The silences have as much to say as what is said.
Mark begins with a prophet in the wilderness, John, and a peasant from Galilee called Jesus. Mark choses to avoid Jesus’ family background, his class, his status, any social credentials. Jesus is not portrayed as royalty, or as a miraculous birth. Instead Mark begins with Jesus as an adult, arriving from the margins of society. Mark tells us this man is from Nazareth, not Bethlehem, Nazareth being an obscure rural town with no political or religious importance in the Galilee, a cosmopolitan area of many different cultures. Jesus in Mark’s Gospel is named in the very first verse as the Messiah (appealing to Jewish readers) and the Son of God (appealing to Roman readers) But this Messiah and son of God does not come from Bethlehem nor Jerusalem, but from the outskirts. Just as John who baptizes him in the first chapter is from the wilderness, clothed in camels hair, eating foraged wild food, so Jesus comes to the Jordan from the margins. And so Mark is already placing those who come from the margins as being where God is working.
This would have resonated with Mark’s audience, who were gentiles and Jews, living with economic and political instability, trying as adults to survive in very vulnerable times. God, Mark is saying, is here among you, on the margins, amongst those society is overlooking.
Secondly, we see Jesus as an adult choosing to be baptized. This is not the vulnerable child, but the adult Jesus whose first act is to chose to be baptized. Mark is reminding his audience they have the capacity to chose. Power is found in ability to make choices. And so Jesus in the opening verses of Mark is seen making the choice to be baptized.
Mark is also letting us know that this Messiah, this Son of God will be shaped by humility. He will seek baptism as one with all the crowds, he will not think of himself as above any others, but root himself with all those seeking a renewed experience of God and God’s presence. What is also important is that Mark clearly tells us that this is a baptism of repentance. Many people have argued about whether Jesus, who traditionally has been thought of as sinless needed to be baptized, because what would he have needed to repent of? I think again though we see the humility of Jesus, saying my life too is going to be marked by the constant need to let go of so many things in order to follow my true path and calling. Because repentance is essentially about letting go, and choosing to walk in the opposite direction. Jesus’ life would be marked in many ways by a radical repentance, letting go of the human desire for wealth, security, safety, family, power and ego and choosing instead to live in a way that was radically different. And so jesus identifies in the opening chapter of Mark with outcasts, sinners, sick people, women, gentiles and the demon possessed as one seeking God and seeking repentance. Mark is completely upending any expectations and assumptions we have about the Messiah and the Son of God and strength, royalty and even power and leadership, and that God is actively working instead among the crowds, of which his readers are a part.
And then in Mark we see Jesus being identified directly by God as You are my Son whom I love, with you I am well pleased. For Mark, the identity of Jesus is the beloved Son of God, who holds the approval of God. And this will be contrasted in the next chapters by how Jesus will be constantly misunderstood and rejected by the religious leaders, by his own hometown and even his family. Even his disciples will not understand the idea of the Messiah who will suffer. They too expect power and glory. No one will approve of him – but what is crucial for Mark is that God does. He holds the approval of God. For Jesus shows us from the ministry of John that greatness comes not from the clothes we wear, the family we come from, our wealth or positions in society, but greatness comes from serving others, and being true to God’ s calling to us.
And so in Mark’s Gospel we see Jesus rejecting, as an adult from his baptism, political power, religious hierarchies and social dominance. His Kingdom, Mark will show us, will be in direct opposition to these systems of power and control, which have excluded the very readers of Mark’s Gospel.
The Gospel of John is written to Jewish and Samaritan people, living around Ephesus and modern day Turkey. They were diverse urban believers who had been kicked out of the local synagogues, because of their response to Jesus. These were people familiar in an urban environment with Jewish traditions but also Greek philosophy. They were people who were spiritually searching, wrestling with this man Jesus, his divinity his humanity, and were trying to understand the theological and spiritual meaning and implication of this man Jesus. And so we see John’s Gospel is much more philosophical, spiritual and theological, it’s about trying to make meaning of this man Jesus, and its written specifically for a community who have been kicked out of their faith systems because of this grappling, and so many ways are socially insecure, on the margins of their society now, trying to function without priests and leaders who would have helped them connect to God, and so they are seeking how to encounter God without the established religious systems they were born into.
And so in John’s Gospel we also have no traditional birth narrative. No nativity, manger, mary or Joseph, no angels, Herod or Bethlehem. John’s birth story takes us instead into the cosmos itself. Here we see Jesus being the very Word through which the whole cosmos is created. There is no origin story for Jesus because Jesus is the origin of everything. And instead we have Jesus being that which is before all creation, God Godself. So for John the origin story of Jesus is that Jesus is God, the one through whom everything will be created and take origin. So John tells us not a historical narrative as much as a cosmic theological story. A story reminding this community that this Jesus who has turned their lives upside down is God, it is God that they follow, not just a man.
And then John shifts to “the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us.” God enters the world in physicality, in a human body, not as one ruling over angels, but as one who choses to dwell among us.
Talk about class reversal – a God who leaves immortality and takes finite human flesh. A God who is the origin of all creation becoming that which is created. A God who comes from the heights of the cosmos and yet enters below as a vulnerable human baby. And this child is not even recognized for who he is, nor received for who he is.
So the power reversal in John’s Gospel in staggering. God from the highest heights we can conceive of, enters in the lowest possible way, in order to be with us. To live among us. John’s Gospel will show how salvation is about being with, initiated by a God who choses to relinquish all power and status in order to be with us. This would resonate with Johns readers who also have let go of synagogues and roman rituals to follow Jesus, who would have left the security and social status of their communities to become disciples of the son of God.
Again Johns Gospel will show us that although coming to us, we did not receive him, but instead he will face rejection. Even in darkness, the light of the world will be rejected. John is from the beginning of his Gospel critiquing established power structures that fail to recognize God when God choses powerlessness, humility and to be among the common people. Why then should John’s audience be surprised if they too are rejected? For if God is rejected, why would they not equally be?
What we do see in John’s birth narratives in this development of a new class, a new identity – the concept of “children of God” and so John says to all who receive him he gave the right to become children of God. This new class or identity is not based on birth, culture, lineage, wealth or status but simply on the capacity to receive God in lowly form. It’s interesting that this new class is based not so much on ideology or belief as much on the capacity to receive God in a form we would look down on as being too poor, to naked, too vulnerable, too powerless.
And so divine children, children of God are now those who can receive the poor, the vulnerable, who can receive God amongst us, not on those who have the right bloodlines, wealth or status but in ordinary folk.
John is reminding his readers, that they are part of the birth of a new family, and so even though they would have lost family members and friends in their expulsion from their synagogue, God is forging a new family, of which they are a part.
Again in John we don’t see Bethlehem or Jerusalem being named, but instead Nazareth – John reminds us of the saying – can anything good come from Nazareth? Because Nazareth was known to be poor, irrelevant, and while people would use where he was born to discredit Him, this is in fact precisely the point. God choses to move from the heights of the cosmos to Nazareth, a small, poor village. And so John both exposes the class prejudice that was alive and well at the time, and shows how God instead choses that which is considered least.
Again John will reveal our prejudice by quoting what people were saying such as “is this not Jesus the son of Joseph?” People were struggling to accept that God could come from such an ordinary background amongst them.
And so in both Mark and John we don’t find the traditional birth stories. For Mark Jesus comes as an adult from the margins, from Nazareth. For John, Jesus comes from the margins of the cosmos to Nazareth as the Word of God, and the Light of the World.
Both Mark and John show us a God whose life will be characterized by letting go – in Mark it’s the first act of baptism, the act of renunciation. For John it’s the act of leaving the cosmos, and entering a world of flesh and darkness. Chosing to leave false identities related to power, wealth, status and fame is central to both Gospels.
And lastly in both Gospels we see true identity being revealed, In Mark Jesus is the beloved son of God, and in Johns Gospel we are invited to become ourselves children of God. But both identities are enabled by humility. God is pleased when the Son of God chooses the humility of baptism, amongst the common people searching for God. And in John we are made children of God by choosing to receive God in the form of the lowest and most vulnerable among us.
For both salvation and wholeness will be found in relationships – amongst the poor, choosing to be with them and to see God in them, and the power of God will be seen in sacrificial relationship rooted in love and service.
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