Masters of
Surprise; Mark and Thomas:
The Advent- ure of God. |
| Sermon Notes: Advent, Year B In Advent this year, we begin year “B” of the Common Lectionary. This means we read through the gospel of Mark. Mark provides a challenge to theologians and biblical scholars alike. It presents, in a rough “street” Greek, sayings and narrative passages that, if we approach them with a willingness to allow our presuppositions to be challenged, bring us to a new understanding of God’s “Advent- ure” with us. For us, the Gospels and the Christmas story have assumed a particular pattern that is predictable and well worn. We are not surprised or dismayed by the gospel. For us, the gospel stories and sayings are familiar territory. They too often merely confirm our presuppositions. However, for the first hearers of the sayings of Jesus and the gospel narratives, the experience would have been disturbing, as one’s presuppositions and religious assumptions were challenged. The First
Gospels: Mark and Thomas
Thomas and Mark are among the
first
Gospels written. Mark is the first narrative gospel included in
the Canonical gospels. Thomas,
which we had only in Greek
fragments until the Nag Hammadi discovery of December 1945,
is a
"sayings" gospel, with no narrative about the deeds of Jesus.
Many date
this gospel to a period even before Mark’s gospel. Thomas is a startling and puzzling
collection of sayings attributed to Jesus. Some of the material
is
paralleled in Mark and in the other Synoptic gospels, and some is found
only in
Thomas. The order in which the sayings are collected does not
parallel
any of the existing Gospels, and because there is no narrative
framework, the sayings are independent of any occasion in the life of
Jesus.The sayings, even when they parallel familiar words, are often startling and even disturbing: Those who seek should not stop seeking until they find. When they find, they will be disturbed. . . . Jesus said, The Father's imperial rule is like an assassin who wanted to kill someone powerful. While still at home, he drew his sword and thrust it into the wall, to find out whether his hand would go in. Then he killed the powerful one. (Thomas 2 and 98.) The Gospel of Thomas is valuable, if for no other reason than its capacity to awaken us to hearing the challenging voice of the Jesus of history. Without doubt, Jesus brought into human history a challenge to religious structures and presuppositions. He challenged his hearers to receive God in a different way, and to see God’s presence in reality as one that breaks human certitude and self-righteousness. In Donald Juel’s “A Master of Surprise: Mark Interpreted” Mark’s gospel is recovered for what it was for its original hearers and readers, a surprise and an overturning of all expectations. Juel points out how the language we have grown familiar with: “Good news,” “Christ” and “Son of God,” was in fact used by the gospel writer in a radically different way. For example, the very Greek word euggelion, “good news” or gospel, denotes victory in battle. It was a word used to speak of military victories and power. When applied to Jesus, the hearer must rethink the categories and ways of seeing the world, and move into a new way of seeing things. If the ruling power of reality is not understood as expressed in the victories of powerful armies and rulers, then how do we understand reality? The hearer must give up the pattern of reality dictated by the powerful and strong. To re-imagine a world where “good news” is found in the story of an itinerant Palestinian Rabbi who was crucified by the most powerful forces in the world is literally to "turn the world upside down." Even to use the term “Christ,” which means simply the “anointed” or chosen one, as Mark does, must have been very disturbing. The Israelite tradition of the “anointed” was again of kingship and military power. The surrounding peoples would understand the "anointed" or “Christ” to be a ruler or king, selected by a god to rule over a people. What Mark portrays is a “Christ” figure who behaves and is found not in the ruling class nor performing the acts of a king, but as a somewhat foolish figure who rides on donkeys and does not perform as a king at all. The crucifixion, the worst form of punishment imaginable, would never be inflicted on a “Christ,” an anointed ruler. The Advent- ure and Surprise of God
Both Thomas and Mark are
writings that
disturb and call for a rethinking of our ways of understanding
religion, politics and power. They present a kind of subversive
vision
that undermines all the “powers and principalities” of religion,
politics, and economics. When we make our advent journey, perhaps
it
could be a time of opening up to the surprising possibilities of a God
known in a baby born to a Jewish peasant girl out back in a barn.
A
child that goes on, not to success on the battlefield nor in
the realm of power politics, but to challenge the authorities and be
crucified by them. Brian Stoffregen, of Faith Lutheran Church in
California
writes:I've heard the gospel of Mark summarized with the statement 'Before you decide to become a Christian, you had better make sure that you look good on wood.' As we enter the fantasy of the commercial Christmas season, it may be good to remind our hearers about the real costs of following that baby who will be born. If we want to hear Mark afresh we need to look at the Advent/Christmas season as a time to begin to hear the good news it speaks of as a disturbance of world authorities. Although we may not have the same misconceptions about "Christ/Messiah" or "Son of God" as the ancient Greeks and Hebrews, our understandings of "victory" and of Jesus and what following him means needs some redefining, just as it did for those first hearers of Jesus and of the early gospels. The way that is being prepared is a way that is not about the success or victory defined by the powerful in our times, any more than it was defined by the powerful in the time of Jesus or the gospel writers. Our journey to Bethlehem, if it attends to the good news the writer of Mark introduces, would be like that the Magi took as described by T.S. Elliot: All this was a long time ago, I remember, And I would do it again, but set down This set down This: were we led all that way for Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly, We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death, But had thought they were different; this Birth was Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death, We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, With an alien people clutching their gods. I should be glad of another death. --T.S. Elliot, The Journey of the Magi. __________________________________________________________________________ In December 1945, a set of 52 religious and philosophical texts, hidden in an earthenware jar for 1,600 years, was accidentally unearthed. Not far from the village of Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt, Mohammed Ali Samman had gone off in search of some sabakh, a natural fertiliser, in the mountains close to the village. He accidentally unearthed a red earthenware jar approximately 1 meter high. At first, he was reluctant to break it, fearing that it might contain an evil sprit. The lure of money and his curiosity finally got the better of him. But instead of the gold that he had been hoping to find, he merely saw a dozen books, bound in brown leather cases, which he took back to his home in Al Quasr. Unaware of his priceless find, he threw them onto the pile of straw used as fuel for their oven. His mother, Umm-Ahmad, even used bits of the books to keep the fire going. This corpus of 1,200 pages is currently conserved at the Coptic Museum in Cairo, and it contains one text in particular that made the headlines - the Gospel according to Thomas, which was originally called 'the secret words of Jesus written by Thomas.' New Testament scholars have varying opinions about the age of Thomas, but many feel that it represents a very early strand of the gospel tradition, perhaps pre-dating most other writings. In any case, Thomas provides important clues into a fairly early time in the Christian tradition. Some books and websites on Thomas: Books: Stephen Davies. The Gospel of Thomas: Annotated & Explained (Skylight Paths Publishing, 2002). Elaine Pagels. Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (Random House, 2003). Stephen J. Patterson. The Gospel of Thomas and Jesus (Polebridge Press, 1993). Richard Valantasis. The Gospel of Thomas (Routledge, 1997). Donald Juel. Master of Surprise: Mark Interpreted (Augsburg Press, 2002). This book has been out of print but is now being re-printed. Additional Websites: http://www.gospels.net/thomas/: An Interlinear translation of the Gospels, including Thomas. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/maps/primary/gthomas.html: This is a PBS “Frontline” posting of an English translation of the Coptic text by Stephen Patterson & Marvin Meyers. http://home.epix.net/~miser17/Thomas.html The Gospel of Thomas HomePage - Steven Davies' award-winning site provides links to everything on Thomas on the WWW, including 5 English translations & the complete text of Davies' own book on The Gospel of Thomas & Christian Wisdom Traditions. |
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