READING BETWEEN THE TEXTS: MINOR CHARACTERS WHO PREPARE THE WAY FOR JESUS

Encounter, Winter 2005 by Gardner, A Edward

The immediate problem is whether Pilate will use his power to release or condemn Jesus to death. But the deeper obstacle is the problem of how God's saving purpose is to be achieved with Jesus now facing death. God's saving purpose is not achieved by avoiding death, but by the very event of Jesus being sent away to the cross. How does Barabbas (which means "son of the father," a play on his name) help in this manner? Jesus is the scapegoat substituted and punished for Barabbas's crimes. Jesus is dying for Barabbas and his sins. He is the ransom, to put it another way. Jesus has tricked Satan, who was intent on destroying Jesus, but, in destroying Jesus, Pilate lets the sinner (Barabbas) go free. The episode represents wisdom and love and irony at its best. The minor character of Pilate has been foreshadowed in the Temptation as a type of "wild beast" now in league with Satan, who rules the world through its political leaders. The minor character of Barabbas represents the sinners for whom Jesus will die, and so achieve the saving purpose of God.

THE CENTURION

The pattern of someone crying out Jesus's identity finds its culmination in the minor character of the centurion with another ironic twist. On the cross, "at the ninth hour Jesus cried [boao] with a loud voice [phone] in Aramaic, 'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?'" (15:34). Just before he dies, "Jesus uttered a loud cry [phone], and breathed his last" (15:37). At the climax of the Gospel, the curtain of the temple is torn in two, and a centurion confesses Jesus's identity: "Truly this man was the Son of God!" The way of the Lord, the saving purpose of God, has been fulfilled in Jesus's death. The writer of Mark has chosen the Greek boao (not krazo) and phone to come full circle to the prophecy: "the voice [phone] of one crying [boao] in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight" (1:3). If the obstacle or scandal (or stumbling block) is the death of the Messiah on the cross, the centurion lets the reader know this is the climactic work of the Son of God: the defeat of Satan by the Son of God. Minor characters have given the reader variations upon Jesus's real identity: Son of David, Son of the Most High God, the King of the Jews, and the Son of God.

I propose that, with awesome courage, wisdom, love, and trust in God, Jesus has set a trap for Satan, giving himself as a ransom and offering himself as a scapegoat, upon whose body the Prince of Demons is exorcized and cast out (ekballo) like a common demon-like the Legion-possessed man, a minor character, whom Jesus exorcised by having the demons enter swine to bear them away to their death as they drown (type of baptism) in the Sea of Galilee (5:1-13). In baptism, Satan's power is broken; the sinner is made clean and set free.

THE WOMEN AT THE TOMB PREPARE THE WAY OF THE LORD

As developed in my thesis for the Master of Sacred Theology degree at Christian Theological Seminary, the abrupt ending of the Gospel of Mark is a riddle - a chiasmic riddle." Does fear and failure have the final say at 16:8, the close of the Gospel? Do the women flee out of fear and say nothing to anyone? The answer to these riddles is that the end of Mark implies its beginning. In fact, fear suggests not human fright but holy awe.12 The answer to the riddle is an unstated, new proverb. That new, split proverb that implicitly frames the entire Gospel of Mark is "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God," Mark is a mega-chiasmus whose ending joins the beginning to form a circle of stories-perhaps better, a necklace of stories. It is curious that scholars who argue for multiple meanings for polyvalent language assign only one meaning each to "flee," "say nothing to anyone," and "were afraid." I suggest that fleeing when "the sun had risen" (16:2) is qualitatively different than the fleeing of the disciples at night when Jesus was arrested (14:50). The word-play here depends upon a difference in context and a difference between night and day (no pun intended). The narrator comments that the women "said nothing to anyone" as they hurried directly to the disciples to tell them of Jesus's resurrection and that they would see him in Galilee. The phrase "said nothing to anyone" can suggest an idiom for a limited circumscribed silence as they fulfilled the mission on which they were sent. "Were afraid" suggests not only human fright but holy fear of God. The Gospel writer has not fallen into a trap that causes the deconstruction of Mark;13 rather, many readers have fallen into the trap of Mark's riddle because of their expectations of the text. Scholars have certain expectations of a text, and while these expectations sometimes help us understand the text, sometimes our expectations make us blind to its implicit meaning. Consistent with the motif of obstacles in the way, the author of Mark has put an obstacle in the reader's way by making his ending a riddle.