Note from Rowland: if you’re conservative on the issue of homosexuality, you might be tempted to dismiss the whole of my liberal friend Harry’s wisdom about vested interests and the evils of institutions… Best to be discerning, and not throw out babies with what you might consider to be bathwater… (Let the one who has ears… hear).

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Harry T. Cook

2/01/09

Mark 1: 21-28

The passage from The Gospel according to Mark referenced above — the fantastic story of a demon being exorcised from a man in the synagogue at Capernaum — is the opening salvo of the author’s argument that the social and cultic regimen under which he and others of his time and place lived had to be dismantled for the sake of mercy and justice.

The target of the story’s point seems by indirection to be the scribal class. The onlookers in the synagogue, flabbergasted at the exorcism, are made to say that Jesus’ power, whatever it was, amounted to “a new teaching,” “with authority” and “not as the scribes.”

The scribes were those who kept track of and assiduously copied the texts of the law. Some of them were learned masters; others were bureaucrats. Both kinds of scribes occupied territories of official privilege and had to be reckoned with by common folk. One has trouble inferring from any mention of scribes in the New Testament an author’s good opinion of them. The term “scribes” in the passage at hand from Mark probably refers to those who feed off any established system and work to maintain its establishment by discouraging or even persecuting those who want to change it. The author of Mark often depicts Jesus as challenging the dominant social system of First Century Palestine. Rooted in the rigid purity codes and their enforcement, that system was not meant to and often did not serve the needs of what today we would call low income or otherwise disenfranchised persons. Though Mark provides no information about what he thought Jesus’ precise origins might have been, it is clear that the Jesus of his imagination was of common, perhaps even peasant, background. Dominic Crossan calls Jesus a “Mediterranean Jewish peasant.” One can appreciate the sensation that the Capernaum exorcism might have caused by imagining a deranged street-person barging into a prim and proper church in some leafy American suburb and calling for the demons to come out of it. Every cell phone in the place would soon be connected to 911. Who among the habitués of St. Swithin’s-in-the-Field would dream of its being the local branch office of iniquity? There you have the force of the story. Mark was saying that the supposedly holy place — irony of ironies — was a haven for the demons of oppression and injustice disguised as scribes and other religious and civic dignitaries. More than that, Mark was laying down a marker for those who would ever after read or hear his words: “Beware the venue of vested interest and established privilege. It may not be there for your benefit.” Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Joseph Ratzinger, the Bishop of Rome — chieftains of their respective churches — are the embodiments of vested interests. Last summer, Archbishop Williams excluded the Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson from the once-a-decade conclave of Anglican bishops, not primarily because Bishop Robinson is an openly (shall we say honest?) gay man, but because a clutch of conservative bishops raised a ruckus about that fact. Their cramped and ungenerous interpretation of scripture makes out the Bishop of New Hampshire to be an unshriven wretch fit only to be shunned. Williams said in effect that he wanted to keep the conservatives in the fold — on their terms, of course.

Last week, Ratzinger, giving in to fringe elements of world Catholicism, restored four ultra-conservative bishops to a state of grace — one of them being an outspoken Holocaust denier. Ratzinger wants to bring back into the Roman fold those who left it over the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, never mind the cost in world opinion. Shades of George W. Bush. Closer to home, the otherwise spectacular and spectacularly wonderful inauguration of President Obama the other week was seriously marred by the inclusion of a West Coast mega-church minister who gave his name and that of his church to the promotion of Proposition 8, which denies the basic human right of marriage to gay and lesbian persons in California. In all three cases, the disrespect, if not actual hatred, of a minority was christened. That is the kind of demon Mark’s Jesus was depicted as encountering in the Capernaum synagogue. The demon has apparently transferred its membership from Capernaum to Lambeth Palace and thence to Vatican City. How shall it be cast out?

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© Copyright 2008, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.