Jesus In Context: Controlling Familiarity and God’s Holy Man

            The gospel readings for the 13th, 14th, and 15th Sundays in ordinary time (Mk 5:21-43; 6:1-6, 7-13) offer us a reasonably sustained narrative portion of Mark’s gospel important for developing the identity of the text’s main character Jesus.  Recalling Jesus’ extraordinary experience of his own baptism by John and temptation in the wilderness by Satan (1:9-13), two scenes that establish Jesus as God’s Holy Man, the reader is prepared to hear the gospel readings, attentive to how Jesus not only demonstrates his power as the Holy Man of God, but also as one who confers similar powers on to his closest followers – his disciples.  Like Jesus, the disciples are eventually enabled to mediate between the spirit world and the world of normal experience and so to affect healings and exorcism of spirits back to the world from which such spirits came (6:7; 3:14-15).

            From Jesus’ baptism in Mark 1, right up to chapters 5 & 6, the bulk of the narrative centers not only on Jesus’ conflict with the Pharisees, but also the power of God’s Holy Man to perform “miracles.”  It is important to note that the performance of such miracles in the ancient Mediterranean world was not in itself unusual or unexpected as such.  At that time, people recognized a reality that included different worlds inhabited by spirits, angels, and demons that often roamed from their world into ours, and entered into individuals, animals, or forests, and/or did wondrous things.  Spirit “possession” was understood to often take the form of illness, insanity, or “dumbness” in humans.  Jesus, God’s Holy Man, being the chosen mediator between the worlds, was empowered to remove such spirits.  In addition, Jesus, as well as many spirits from the spirit world, was able to perform deeds that Western people today would anachronistically describe as “supernatural.”  However, such events – including “miracles” like calming storms and walking on water – were not at that time understood to be “super-natural,” or “above” the natural order of things.  Rather, in the ancient world, “miraculous” deeds and the like were understood to be quite natural events given the reality of alternate worlds, angels and demons, and the existence of people (like Prophets!) who could mediate between “the worlds” and perform “miraculous” deeds.  What was understood to be surprising at times about miracles was the source of the power that was behind the phenomenon.  The reading for the 14th Sunday relates a story about Jesus that has to do precisely with such power, and the attempt to manage such power because of the perceived threat such power poses to the status quo. 

Having returned to his hometown with his disciples, Jesus astounds “many” in the synagogue with his teaching (Mk 6:2a).  Such astonishment, according to the text, compels his audience into a fevered process of power management which, in this case, comes in the form of questioning Jesus’ identity, the character of his wisdom, and the source of his power:

Where did this man get all this?  What is the wisdom that has been given to him?  What deeds of power are being done by his hands!  Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?  And they took offense at him (Mark 6:2b-3).

In the face of the undomesticated power of God evident in Jesus’ words and deeds, the people who know Jesus the most – his kinfolk from his own home town – attempt to control this Prophet and the power he wields, by asserting their familiarity with him.  In other words, by (re)asserting amongst themselves Jesus’ identity as a home town local boy, someone who “we know” all too well, the threat that Jesus’ words and deeds pose to the status quo is diminished – God’s Holy Man is domesticated.  That power is indeed what is at stake in this story is made clear by Mark who comments that the result of the people’s controlling familiarity is that Jesus “could do no deed of power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them” (6:5).  So, the attempt to domesticate Jesus on the part of the “many who heard him,” results astonishingly in Jesus’ inability to exercise his power among them.  Prior to this point in Mark’s narrative, Jesus’ words and deeds of power are punctuated time-and-again with the comment that all present were “amazed” (Mk 1:27; 2:1-12; 4:41; 5:42).  In a final twist of irony, in this gospel reading it is not “the many,” but Jesus who stands amazed – amazed at the unbelief of the folks in his hometown (6:6). 

Belief, or unbelief, in this text (and in the ancient world) has nothing to do with “believing” that something supernatural (above nature) can happen so long as one takes a “leap of faith,” or something of the kind.  The suggestion that such power is “super-natural” is indeed, an anachronism.  Belief rather, has to do with recognizing that Jesus is the Holy Man of God (not only a “local hero”) – and that God is the source of Jesus’ wisdom and power.  How is it then, that according to the text, those who think they know Jesus the most, are precisely those among whom Jesus is unable to work any deeds of wondrous power?