In 2006, Franciscan theologian Richard Rohr visited Australia and was interviewed on ABC Radio National’s “Religion Report”. At the time, I was particularly impressed by a point Rohr made in distinguishing between “Christianity” and “Churchianity”, where the first constituted a challenge to the prevailing wider societal mores and values, while the second supported the cultural status quo.

Whatever one may think of Rohr’s distinction between “Christianity” and “Churchianity”, it does open up a fruitful line for discussion of the meaning of Mark’s gospel. Written at a time when the Jesus movement was anything but part of the status quo, the gospel is culturally subversive.

The problem that confronted the Markan Christians, as it does us today, is to steer a middle course between the twin tensions of conformity to cultural expectations and the vocation to be counter cultural (where necessary) in working for a better world. Mark’s Jesus proclaimed a new world order that would privilege the marginalised and the forgotten; or as Biblical scholars John Dominic Crossan and Tom Wright have variously called, “a kingdom of nuisances and nobodies”.

In Mark’s gospel, Jesus is a man who haunts the fringes of society, fraternising with the marginalised, touching the untouchables, speaking to those with whom he should not speak and, thereby, breaking the taboos of his Jewish faith and the mores of the Greco-Roman culture.

Positive interactions with Jesus are typically displayed by characters living on society’s margins – the “nobodies”; people who were of no consequence: the leper (1:40-45); the paralytic (2:1-12); the deaf (7:31-37); the blind (8:22-26; 10:46-52); the widow (12:41-44); as well as tax collectors and sinners (2:15).

In his preaching, Jesus repeatedly criticises the abusive use of power by society’s wealthy and respectable authorities. And it is this critique of abusive power that eventually ends in Jesus’ arrest and execution as a rabble rouser and a criminal of the State.

As Richard Rohr points out, Jesus was not an “insider” or a “company man” (Rohr, 2006); which is not to say that Jesus is an “outsider” per se. Mark’s Jesus is a reputable teacher and scholar – a man of some consequence – but he refuses to operate within the boundaries set by either the religious elites or civil authorities, the somebodies of “good society”. Indeed, he even refuses to stay dead! 

Mark’s Jesus is not interested in “Churchianity” — that is, sticking to rules that govern membership in the club or the “ekklesia” (assembly or church). He is a social reformer who seeks the company of those deemed to be “beyond the pale”; an agent of God who proclaims, not a kingdom of the wealthy and notable – the “somebodies” in society – but that of the poor, the forgotten, the “nuisances and nobodies” – and he calls his disciples to go to the margins and do the same.

The final command in Mark’s gospel is the call to “return to Galilee” (16:7), to the dirt-poor farmers and fishers at the rural fringes of Roman Palestine.

Ian J Elmer

© Majellan Media 2024