Mark's gospel was the manifesto of a Christian community struggling to incarnate a new way of life which was in fundamental conflict with the dominant socio-political order of first-century Roman Palestine. We saw in the last study ("Binding the Strong Man," March 1987) that Mark's narrative strategy in the first major section of the story was predominantly subversive, functioning to delegitimize the ideologies and institutions with which the kingdom of God contended.
At the same time, certain aspects of Jesus' first campaign articulated a positive alternative, such as his fellowship with the outcast (2:15f.) and his creation of a discipleship community (1:15-20; 3:13-19). The next major section (4:35-8:21) makes this constructive task its central concern. Jesus' departure in a boat across the Sea of Galilee (4:35) signals the beginning of a new round of symbolic action which dramatizes the concrete social and economic shape of the kingdom as a "new creation."
Scholars have puzzled over the fact that Mark, otherwise the sparest of the gospel writers, in this section waxes curiously redundant. He narrates not one but two perilous sea crossings (4:35-41; 6:45-53) and two feedings of hungry masses in the wilderness (6:33-44; 8:1-9). In addition, Jesus' healings are neatly organized into pairs: two Jews (5:21-43) and two Gentiles (7:24-37). The notoriously superficial commentary on these stories misses their significance by ignoring both their social and literary dimensions.
Remembering the essential relationship between form and content, we can better observe Mark's narrative strategy by stepping away from the chronological flow of events in order to identify the underlying structure of the section. This approach reveals a distinct pattern of two parallel cycles of ministry on different "sides" of the Sea of Galilee, linked by boat trips back and forth across the sea. Since the section itself opens and closes with such voyages (4:35-41; 8:13-21), let us begin our study there.
Jesus' first of two extended sermons (4:1-34) concludes his ministry in and around Capernaum, located in Jewish Galilee near the lake. Afterward he invites his disciples to embark in a boat to cross to "the other side" of the sea (4:35). Mark consistently refers to the freshwater lake in Galilee as a "sea" in order to invoke Old Testament images.
During this voyage a storm arises, and in a moment of high pathos, the disciples scream at their dozing leader, "Master, do you not care? We are dying!" (4:38; see Jonah 1). Jesus silences the winds (see Psalm 107:23, 29), just as he previously did the demons (4:39; 1:25).
The episode ends, however, not with relief or triumph but with back-to-back questions which suggest a mutual incredulity, even suspicion: Jesus asks, "Do you not yet have faith?" (4:40; see 8:21). The disciples then say to one another, "Who then is this, that even the sea and wind obey him?" (4:41).
Remember that upon arriving in the Gentile territory of the Decapolis (5:1, 20), Jesus wrestled a demon to learn his name (5:7-10) and then drove this "Legion" into the sea (5:13; see Exodus 14). This symbolic confrontation with the powers—imperial Rome's military occupation of Palestine—inaugurated Jesus' ministry to the Gentiles, after which he returned to "Jewish" territory (5:21).
The next voyage occurs in the middle of this study's text, only this time Jesus must force his disciples to get into the boat for another trip—by themselves—to the "other side" (6:45). The disciples again struggle against the winds and again are rescued by Jesus (6:48-51; see Exodus 3:14; 33:19,22). The crossing, however, is unsuccessful; the disciples do not reach Bethsaida, on the eastern shore, but are driven back to Gennesaret on the western shore (6:53). As a result Mark escalates his criticism of the disciples: They are "hard hearted"—an accusation previously reserved for Jesus' political opponents (6:52; see 3:5).
THE CHARGE IS BECAUSE "they did not understand about the loaves." It is this mysterious business about "loaves" that becomes the focus of the third and final voyage to "the other side" (8:13-21). But this crossing, which does finally arrive at Bethsaida (8:22), narrates neither storm nor rescue—only a conversation about bread. In fact this story represents a kind of "interpretive epilogue" to the first half of the gospel (8:14-21). In it Jesus interrogates his disciples—and by implication, the reader—about whether or not they have understood the meaning of his symbolic actions.
The issue revolves around a distinction between "loaf " and "loaves," so some literal translation will help: "The disciples had forgotten to bring loaves, and had only one loaf with them in the boat....And Jesus said to them, 'Why do you discuss the fact that you have no loaves?'" (8:14,17a). Jesus' exasperation with his disciples' "dysfunctioning" faculties of comprehension (heart, eyes, and ears, 8:17f.) calls to mind Moses' similar censure of his people, who had also forgotten what they had "known, seen, and heard" of the liberating acts of Yahweh (Deuteronomy 29:2-4).
Jesus thus echoes the Deuteronomic exhortation to "remember" (8:18; see Deuteronomy 32:7), which is also Mark's signal to the reader to review the narrative. With such permission to "jump around" in the narrative, we will now go back and read the section from the vantage point of this last boat conversation, taking its cues and clues. First and foremost we are directed to the two feedings in the wilderness.
We pick up the story at 6:30f., where the disciples have returned from their first solo mission (6:7-13). Jesus urges them to withdraw for reflection (see 1:35), but once again the escape is unsuccessful (6:32f.). Jesus feels deep "compassion" (the word literally means his "guts were churning") for these crowds who have sought him out even in the wilderness, and he proceeds to teach them until evening (6:34).
Enough for Jew and Gentile
As it grows late, the disciples demand that Jesus send the people away so that they can buy food in the neighboring villages (6:35f.). Jesus' response is blunt: "You give them something to eat." The disciples are indignant at the prospect of having to dig into their own pockets to aid the hungry (6:37-38). But while they agonize, Jesus acts. Determining the food on hand, he organizes the crowd, blesses the loaves and fish, and distributes them (6:38-41). Mark is careful to report that nothing "supernatural" occurs here, except that "all ate and were satisfied" (6:42).
The episode makes at least three Old Testament allusions, each of which adds to its social significance. The most obvious is Yahweh's sustaining of hungry Israelites in the wilderness (Exodus 16). The phrases "going and coming" (6:31) and "sheep without a shepherd" (6:34) are derived from the tradition in which Joshua is appointed "general" over the Israelite tribal confederacy (Numbers 27:16f.). Above all, however, Mark is drawing upon the "food miracles" of the great prophet Elisha during a time of famine (2 Kings 4:42-44).
While theologians love to see "eucharistic" significance in the wilderness feeding, the Elisha story suggests that the economic dimension is paramount. Twice the disciples try to solve the problem of hungry masses by referring it to "market economics" (6:36f.). But Jesus insists that the problem cannot be "sent away" and proposes instead a kind of enacted parable of just distribution, an alternative of self-sufficiency through a practice of sharing available resources.
The same themes are reiterated in the second, briefer feeding story (8:1-9), which takes place this time in the Gentile territory of the Decapolis (7:31). Jesus again is moved by the plight of the crowd: "If I should send them away hungry, they will faint on the way" (8:3).
The disciples' response (8:4) this time is despair: "How can anyone find bread for all these people in the wilderness?" Which is to say, how can the problem be solved outside of the economic system of the dominant social order? Again, repetition being the key to pedagogical success, Mark narrates the solution: Jesus organizes, the people share, and all are satisfied (8:5-9).
These stories reflect the concrete historical situation of the majority of Galilee's rural population. Hunger and poverty were ubiquitous among those disenfranchised by a feudal system of land ownership and an economic system in which the countryside was bled dry by urban and foreign trading interests. The same perspective pervaded Jesus' sermon of parables, in which he brought theology to earth by using real-life, economic metaphors taken from the daily agrarian world to describe the kingdom. There Jesus envisioned a harvest of unprecedented yield (4:8), which would shatter the cycle of poverty in which the indentured peasant—the "sower"—was trapped.
In the wilderness feedings, this hope takes flesh in the "miracle of enough" for the hungry masses through a model of cooperative consumption. Mark will later make it clear that the discipleship community struggles to embody this economic alternative in its own life (10:28-31).
And just as it is contrasted there with the practice of the rich (10:17-27), so too here there is an implicit criticism of market economics: "Shall we go buy two hundred denarii worth of bread...?" (6:37). Indeed Jesus had warned against this "measures" system, which served only to widen the gap between the "haves" and "have-nots" (4:24-25).
Returning to the epilogue, we discover that there is a social as well as economic significance to the "loaves." In 8:19-20 Jesus has us repeat the symbolic number clues. Do we understand? The five loaves for the five thousand and 12 baskets left over represent the Jewish world (the five books of Moses, the 12 tribes of Israel). The seven loaves and baskets left over in turn connote the inclusion of the Gentile world (in Jewish numerology seven was the symbol of completion). Mark even uses different Jewish and Greek terms for "basket" in the respective stories.
In the symbolics of Mark, the purpose of the boat trips from one "side" to the other has been to bridge the segregated worlds of Jew and Gentile. There are not separate "loaves," only the "one loaf," to be shared together by the one, integrated community of the kingdom. That this task of social reconciliation was not only difficult but well-nigh inconceivable explains the harrowing sea stories.
The "wind and waves" (in Jewish mythology, the cosmic forces of chaos, Psalm 104:6-7) opposing the attempted "crossings" represent the fact that the ideological and institutional structures of segregation were considered part of the "natural order" in antiquity.
The enmity between Jew and Gentile was seen by most of Mark's contemporaries as the prototype of all human hostility—not unlike the Cold War in the twentieth century. Yet the social, cultural, and political project of peacemaking between the "two humanities" was central to the gospel of the first Christians, especially Paul. Mark's boat on the sea was adopted by the early church as its symbol and is preserved today in the logo of the World Council of Churches as a sign of the struggle to overcome the alienation and enmity that keeps humanity—and the body of Christ—divided.
The "storms of opposition" to this reconciliation were, and are, real social and political forces. Mark alludes to this at the outset of his interpretive epilogue, when Jesus warns the disciples against the "leaven" of the Pharisees and of Herod (8:15). This leaven threatens to spoil the "one loaf" and is another clue sending us back to the narrative.
If the "one loaf" implied a common meal, then surely the most formidable barrier to its realization was the purity code's prohibitions regarding table fellowship with the "unclean." We have already seen that the social "site" of the meal table was central to the maintenance of group boundaries in Pharisaic practice (see my comments on 2:15f. in "Binding the Strong Man," March 1987), and Mark returns to this problem later (7:1-23). In fact the demands of ritual purity and kosher diet were perceived throughout the early Jewish Christian community as the major ideological obstacle to the project of integration, since both Luke and Paul address it (see Acts 10:9-16 and Romans 14).
Purity of the Heart
MARK DEVELOPS JESUS' DEBATE with the "leaven" of the Pharisees in three parts. The first part serves to explain to the non-Jewish reader some of the issues involved in Pharisaic criticism (7:1-5). The "washing" of hands, produce, and utensils had nothing to do with hygiene but concerned the ritual removal of possible impurity. Jesus responds to the accusation by counterattacking the ideological foundations of his opponents, the Pharisaic oral code, the "tradition of the elders" (7:6-13). He only then returns to the original issue of meal sharing, offering yet another "parable" (7:14-23).
The parable plays rhetorically on the opposition between "internal" and "external" (7:15). Mark's editorial comment interprets it to mean that Jesus "declared all foods clean" (7:19), thus climaxing an assault on the purity code that began when Jesus declared the leper clean in l:41f.
Now, however, Jesus asserts his ideological alternative: The true "site of purity" is not the "body" but the "heart" (the moral center of the person in Jewish anthropology; 7:18f.). Jesus thus redraws the lines of group identity in ethical terms; in place of the ethnocentricity of the purity code is now the rigor of self-scrutiny.
What is the relevance of the inserted dispute concerning the oral tradition? In his citation of Isaiah, Mark claims that it is precisely the site of the heart in which the Pharisee is alienated from the justice of God (7:6), because he places the demands of the dominant symbolic order above the needs of the oppressed.
Jesus illustrates this with an example from Pharisaic oral tradition, a body of interpretation of Mosaic law they regarded as authoritative. The practice of "corban" concerned the willing of one's estate to the Temple, a vow which essentially froze one's assets until death, at which point they were released to the Temple treasury (7:llf.). Such wills represented an important source of revenue for the treasury (referred to in some ancient sources as "corbanas"). But Jesus points out that this practice might well preclude one from the Torah responsibility to provide economic support for one's parents (see Exodus 20:12); hence the "vow" to the Temple becomes a "curse" upon the elderly, who are left financially ostracized (6:10; see Leviticus 20:9).
It is no accident that Mark begins this episode (7:1) by linking the Pharisees with the Jerusalem scribes (see 2:16). Later Jesus will specifically indict both the scribal class and the Temple treasury in a political economy that exploits the poor (12:38-44). By portraying their support for this system, Mark implies that the Pharisees are simply an extension of the long arm of the Jerusalem establishment. He endeavored to persuade poorer Jews that the purity system which purported to uphold their ethnic identity was in fact the very system that oppressed them; those who endorsed this system "nullified the command of God" with their contempt for the weak (7:9).
THE "LEAVEN OF HEROD," on the other hand, is illustrated in Mark's flashback account of the execution of John the Baptist (6:14-29), which belatedly explains the circumstances surrounding the prophet's arrest in 1:14. This is one of three episodes concerning "rejected prophets" which Mark interrelates by weaving them together. The series begins with Jesus' rejection by his own village and kin, becoming a "prophet without honor" (6:1-6).
Rendered a "stranger at home," Jesus next instructs his exile community in learning to be "at home among strangers" (6:7-13). He dispatches his disciples on the messianic mission of proclamation, healing, and exorcism with only the bare necessities for travel. These preachers have no well-funded, high-technology, evangelistic road-show; they are dependent upon the hospitality of the people they serve.
Finally, intruding between the departure (6:12) and return of the apostles (6:30) is the account of John's fate at the hands of Herod (that is, Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilea and Perea from 4 B.C.E.-39 C.E.). In a threadbare transition, Mark tells us that Herod believes that Jesus is John redivivus (returned to life)—in other words, the successor to the Baptist's mission of proclaiming repentance (6:14-16).
In that mission John tangled with the Galilean nobility and lost. Now the Jewish historian Josephus, a contemporary of Mark, tells us that Herod had to get rid of John for a plainly political reason: His preaching was stirring up the people to insurrection. This has led many historical critics to dismiss Mark's tale of the king's moral predicament with his brother's wife and his vacillation toward John as pious legend.
It is the critics, however, who must be dismissed, for Mark's account is hardly pious! First, intermarriage is fundamental to the building and consolidation of royal dynasties, so John's objection could scarcely be more political (6:17). Second, the half-Jewish Herodians conformed to Jewish law only when deemed politically convenient or expedient; otherwise they pursued an aggressive policy of promoting Hellenization, resented by Jewish nationalists. By insisting that Herod be accountable to Torah, the Mosaic law (6:18), John was raising a volatile political issue in the neo-colonial arrangement of Palestine.
Nor should we fail to notice that Mark's portrait of Herodian court intrigue takes on the character of a dark parody (6:19-28). The king throws a dinner party for the ruling classes of Galilee: the nobility, the army, and the civic leaders (6:21). Despite this impressive gathering of government, military, and economic interests, however, it is a young dancing girl and a drunken oath that finally determine the fate of the prophet John (6:22-25). This sardonic caricature of the murderous whims of the powerful stands within the biblical tradition of pitting prophets against kings, a kind of hybrid between the story of Nathan and David (2 Samuel 12) and Esther and Ahasuerus (Esther 1-7).
The close of the flashback (6:29) prefigures the fate of John's successor, Jesus. Indeed, by tightly knitting together these three stories of Jesus, the apostles, and John, Mark identifies the common destiny of all who preach repentance. What holds for "Elijah" will hold for the "Son of Man" (see 9:11-13). So too with Jesus' successors; the disciples must also reckon with their "day in court" (13:9-11) and, in the end, with their cross as well (8:34).
Mark has unmasked the two main forces in Galilean society trying to subvert Jesus' kingdom program of justice and integration: the Pharisees and Herodians (3:6). On the one hand, Pharisaic exclusivism opposed social intercourse between Jew and Gentile on grounds of purity. On the other, the Herodians offered cultural assimilationism and collaboration with Rome (12:13-17) but threatened to neutralize any who resisted (as John found out). Either "leaven" will destroy the delicate social experiment of the "one loaf."
Healings Without Borders
The social vision of this section is finally filled out by two pairs of healings. These further articulate the messianic inclusivity that brings wholeness to both the outcast Jew and the Gentiles. In 5:22-43 Mark offers yet another story-within-a-story. Jesus is approached by a synagogue ruler who appeals on behalf of his ill daughter (5:22-24). On his way to heal her, Jesus is pressed by the crowds and finally interrupted by a woman suffering with unarrestable hemorrhaging (5:25-32). But in attending to her, he appears to default on his original task.
The two characters who fall at Jesus' feet with their petitions (5:22, 33) represent archetypes at the opposite ends of the Jewish social spectrum. Jairus is the "head" of both his family (thus he speaks on behalf of his daughter) and his social group (the synagogue); he approaches Jesus directly as befits male equals. In contrast, the woman from the crowd is both anonymous (reaching out to touch him covertly) and statusless. If, according to the purity code, a menstruating woman had to be quarantined (see Leviticus 15:19f.), how much more one who bled continually? She is doubly poor: not only impure but exploited as well, bankrupted by profiteering physicians (5:26).
Yet it is her initiative that earns the woman wholeness, and the symbolic system is again subverted in the touch of Jesus (as in 1:41). Suddenly she is brought from the margins of the story into its center; she is now the "daughter," her importunity accepted as faith (5:34). Her status now exceeds that of Jesus' own male disciples who are "without faith" (4:40)! But what of the original "daughter"? The episode appears to grind to a tragic halt as Jesus is informed that she has died during the delay (5:35).
Undeterred, Jesus exhorts Jairus to follow the example of the lowly woman and believe (5:36). At the house the mourning turns to derision at Jesus' insistence that the girl only "sleeps" (5:39), but he raises her, to the "astonishment" of the witnesses (5:42; see 16:6). Needless to say, Mark's asides—the girl is 12 years old, the woman suffered for 12 years—are not incidental at all, but the key to the social function of this doublet.
The number symbolizes again the 12 tribes of Israel; one "daughter" represents those privileged under the dominant order, the other those impoverished by it. According to Mark this order, symbolized by the synogogue ruler, is itself "on the verge of death." If it wishes to "live" (5:23), it must embrace the faith of the kingdom, a new social model in which the "last are first" and the "least are greatest" (see 10:31, 43). Matthew's blunt threat to the Jewish leaders that "prostitutes are making their way into the kingdom of God before you" (Matthew 21:31) is here achieved by Mark through dramatic enactment—with equal shock value!
The corresponding doublet in Gentile territory (7:24, 31) further extends the kingdom's inclusivity (7:24-37). The "Syrophoenician woman," appealing on behalf of her daughter, represents the Gentile world and serves as an intentional parallel to Jairus. The modern reader, unfamiliar with accepted social propriety in Hellenistic antiquity, misses the scandal of this encounter, for it narrates events that would have been inconceivable according to the conventions of Mediterranean "honor culture."
To begin with, a strange woman approaches a man in the privacy of his residence; worse, she is a pagan soliciting favor from a Jew (7:24-26). Jesus initially responds in the fashion expected of the male: He defends the collective honor of his people and rebuffs her (7:27; according to a rabbinic saying of the time, "He who eats with an idolator is like one who eats with a dog").
Protocol is strained to the breaking point when the woman then dares to argue with Jesus, defending in turn the right of the "dogs" to eat crumbs from the "children's table" (7:28). But the real jolt is the conclusion: Jesus, who masters every other opponent in verbal riposte, concedes this woman the argument (7:29)!
In the same manner that Jesus' command in 5:43 anticipated the feeding of the Jews, so too does this story prefigure the feeding of the Gentiles (8:1f.), for the "children have indeed first been satisfied" (7:27, see 6:42). Jesus has allowed his privileged status as a male to be "affronted" for the sake of inclusivity (see 9:38-40). So must the collective honor of Judaism suffer the "indignity" of welcoming Gentiles as equals in the messianic order. That the kingdom is now open to the Gentile world is confirmed by the subsequent healing in 7:31-37. Yet even here there is irony; Jesus can make the Gentile deaf hear and the mute proclaim (7:36f.), but not, it turns out, his own disciples (see 8:18).
THIS SECTION CONTAINS ONE last episode, which is in fact the first element in Mark's interpretive epilogue: the demand for a "sign from heaven" (8:11f.). The Pharisees "test" Jesus (see 8:11; 10:2; 12:15), who refuses to give a sign to "this generation" (8:12). This will be an important clue to a proper understanding of what Jesus means when he reveals the "heavenly" spectacle that will be seen by "this generation" (8:38).
In Mark's gospel, signs are sought only by unbelievers; they are unreliable for discerning the meaning of events (see 13:4-5,22). For Jesus, the true proof of God's presence is not heavenly but earthly—the sick healed, the poor liberated, the hungry fed, and enemies reconciled.
Surely these are disturbing stories in our world of explicit and implicit apartheid, vast economic disparity, and institutionalized enmity. For affluent Christians in a starving world, the command "You feed them" has not lost its sting. The kingdom imperative to cross the stormy seas of racism, to give priority to the poor, and to rediscover the "one loaf" of human solidarity is no less urgent, nor is the promise that Jesus has already forged the way any less difficult to truly believe. Do we in the church today have eyes to see this vision, or have we given way to fear (4:40), hardheartedness (6:52), and despair (8:4)?
It is the historical vision of justice and compassion that is dramatized by the symbolic acts of a Jesus who breaks bread in the wilderness and walks on water. The first half of the gospel closes with Jesus' question to his disciples, "Do you not yet understand?" (8:21). It is as if Mark is also warning his readers not to proceed with the rest of the story until we have correctly comprehended the "meaning of the loaves."
Do we "see"? In the realism of Mark's gospel, the answer is probably not. He is well aware of how easily intimacy with Jesus can be accompanied by a lack of understanding of his way. And he will show us how incomprehension can all too soon turn to antagonism (see 8:32) and finally defection (see 14:27, 50). Yet Mark opens the second half of his story with a symbolic action of hope: the healing of a blind man (8:22-26). And at that point, Jesus and the disciples abruptly abandon the site of boat and sea, and set out on the boldest and most dangerous journey of all: the long march to Jerusalem.
Ched Myers had graduated, with a degree in New Testament, from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, when this article appeared. His commentary on Mark is titled Binding the Strong Man.
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!