The Call of the Holy One
Third Sunday after Epiphany, Year B; Mark 1:14-20
For the next three Sundays we have the opportunity (or challenge) of dealing with Mark’s Gospel on its own terms, reading three sequential passages (1:14-20, 21-28, 29-39). Part of the value of the three-year lectionary is its capacity to introduce us to each of the Synoptic Gospels in a way that respects their narrative integrity. For Mark this is particularly important, because imagination tends to supply additions from the others. For the preacher and other readers really to read Mark itself is a discipline, not just a change of literary scene. As Werner Kelber puts it:
If we wish to grasp Mark’s story, we must in a sense lose sight of Matthew’s, Luke’s, and John’s stories. The reading of Mark demands a single-minded concentration on the Marcan text.1
A lot of nuance has to be applied to that “in a sense” phrase, but this is important. The four-fold canon of the Gospels makes an implicit statement about the nature of the truth to which it bears witness: that truth is not a harmonized single version of Jesus, cobbled together according to preference (often Matthean narrative, salted with Johannine discourse); the truth of the Gospel is found in the exchanges the Church has with this actual scripture, with all the tensions between the varied documents, each of which we are audacious enough to call “scripture,” and indeed Gospel. When the Anglican Articles of Religion call on the Church not to “expound one place of Scripture, that it be repugnant to another” (Art. 20) we should hear a rebuke to the fundamentalisms of all sorts that ignore the plurality of scripture by claiming the ready agreement of the inconvenient parts to those deemed more worthy. All is to be read, and we live in the potent if uneasy witness to a single truth that we cannot grasp but which constantly beckons.
So for now we read Mark. In this particular reading we seem to have another beginning of sorts: in characteristically bald terms, we read of Jesus’ appearance back in Galilee, his proclamation of the reign of God, and the call of the first disciples.
Assumed is the ministry of John the Baptist, read twice already this liturgical year (Advent 2, then Epiphany 1) who had also “proclaimed” (v. 4) as Jesus now does. Only when John has been arrested, as NRSV puts it, literally “handed over” (v.14)—a term that will also be used for Jesus (often translated as “betrayed”; see 3:19; 9:31 etc.)—does the era of Jesus begin. These parallels point to how John’s ministry had constituted not just an episode, but a brief yet important period of history, and that now it is not just another person being ushered in, but another age. Both these ages and their protagonists assume a situation of oppression and alienation, and promise the arrival of God’s new intervention to save them.
Despite the recent overlapping lections from the first chapter of Mark, picking up this whole thread only at v. 14 this week makes for one striking omission, the temptation story, which is being saved for its traditional outing in Lent. Since other sections are repeated anyway, this should arguably have been included too, not least because it takes all of two pithy verses (1:12-13). The resulting absence underplays a key to Mark’s sketch of this new “era” of Jesus, that it is not just the arrival of a new significant character, but the inauguration of a cosmic struggle with the forces of evil. This is why the current verses read so much like a beginning (again); the elided mysterious time in the wilderness, elaborated by Mark’s later editors, was the immediate prelude telling us what kind of story this is.
“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”
The dense and suggestive content of this proclamation is a puzzle and a hint. What good news? The answer will come in what follows, as much in deed as word. This Kingdom which is “near” is not an idea, but a force centered on the person of Jesus, who promises as well as commands as he begins the process of freeing Israel from bondage—a bondage which encapsulates the political dominance of Rome and the lurking powers of evil found in illness and destitution. The spiritual nature of the conflict will become inescapable next week when the direct engagement between “the Holy One of God” (1:24) and the demons begins to take place. Yet this basic insight also illuminates the call of the first two disciples.
You may have come across befuddled commentators or preachers trying to rationalize this seemingly absurd event—the instant response of following the stranger— by suggesting (e.g.) that the fishermen already knew Jesus, so this wasn’t really as remarkable as it appears. That harmonized Jesus, not Mark’s but the product of our synthesis and wish-fulfillment, would surely first have persuaded these four followers of the moral and spiritual benefits of becoming his disciples. Such interpretive efforts reveal less of how this story is to be understood, than of how little such readers are actually reading Mark.
The famous “fishers” metaphor, which has been coopted into a sort of muscular Christian notion of making converts, is also part of this picture of the divine power that calls and changes. It may well allude to Jeremiah, who in an oracle of both renewal and judgement promises such an exercise of divine fishing:
I am now sending for many fishermen, says the Lord, and they shall catch them; and afterwards I will send for many hunters, and they shall hunt them from every mountain and every hill, and out of the clefts of the rocks (16:16)
Fishing here is probably not a pleasant business at all (cf. Amos 4:2; Ezek 29:4), but the exercise of divine judgement. These men in the boats find themselves caught in the tide of God’s reign, and join in the retinue of the Holy One as he makes his way forward in this conflict which they do not really understand at all. Yet they, among the poor in Galilee, recognize in a sense beyond words that the liberator has come, and that God’s project of freedom and new life for captive Israel is under way.
So the unlikely character of this call story is part of its point. We should take it at face value: this mysterious Galilean proclaims the reign of God, good news for the poor, but is also that reign’s powerful personal agent, and the forces of good and evil respond not to his sagacity but to his hidden power. This call is quite directly opposed to the logic of rational choices, or sage spiritual growth, that might often be more appealing now as a model of religious vocation, and sometimes was then too. It is of course above all God’s irresistible call of them, not their exercise of religious freedom.
Peter and Andrew and James and John follow, as much compelled as invited, enthused more than persuaded, but drawn to the promise and hope of good news from God. It is not quite meant to make sense yet, and to adjust the picture so as to make it sensible is to render Mark voiceless, and Jesus misinterpreted. The Holy One whom they do not yet understand but trust, and whom we may also still be seeking to understand in ways that go far beyond our knowledge, calls “follow me.”
Kelber, Werner H. Mark’s Story of Jesus. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979.