The Gospel for Monday, March 8, 2004
Mark 3:7-19
Jesus withdrew with his disciples to the lakeside, and great crowds from Galilee followed him. From Judaea, and from Jerusalem, and from Idumaea and Transjordan and the region of Tyre and Sidon, great numbers who had heard of all he was doing came to him. And he asked his disciples to have a boat ready for him because of the crowd, to keep him from being crushed. For he had cured so many that all who were afflicted in any way were crowding forward to touch him. And the unclean spirits, whenever they saw him, would fall down before him and shout, ‘You are the Son of God!’ But he warned them strongly not to make him known. He now went up onto the mountain and summoned those he wanted. So they came to him and he appointed twelve; they were to be his companions and to be sent out to proclaim the message, with power to drive out devils. And so he appointed the Twelve, Simon to whom he gave the name Peter, James the son of Zebedee and John the brother of James, to whom he gave the name Boanerges or ‘Sons of Thunder’; Andrew, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Thomas, James the son of Alphaeus, Thaddaeus, Simon the Zealot and Judas Iscariot, the man who was to betray him. -- The New Jerusalem Bible. 1995, c1985. Doubleday: Garden City, N.Y.
A Study
Mark concentrates on what Jesus did, far more than on what He said. If Jesus' intent was to attract attention and set himself apart from the faith healers and mystics and magicians, he succeeded extravagantly. So much so that he had to take care for his personal safety, always preaching by the side of the lake, with a boat standing by to rescue him when the crowds pushed too closely. Eventually, he took to preaching from the boat.
This is a considerably briefer account of the trip up the mountain and the appointing of the twelve, compared to the other synoptics -- but so is most of Mark. He is always in an excited hurry to get Jesus to Jerusalem the last time, so that the real work of salvation can begin. But here He does appoint twelve, what many students think are the "new Israel," since the then-extant chosen people were such a disappointment. In the past, they had disappointed God in their brazen turning away so often to other Gods. Now they were worshipping Torah, or other creations of their own and not God, nor God's Incarnation for them.
Today's Eucharistic lectionary is for Lent 2, and uses Luke's account of Jesus describing entering the Kingdom only by the narrow door, in great humility. No one with power and authority (as with a shield and sword) can get through the narrow door without becoming defenseless or disarmed. Hence, the first, Israel, may be among the last, while the last, the Gentile Nations, may be first to acknowledge Jesus as Lord, and thus become first through the narrow door.
A Reflection
I often spend time in deep thought, wondering about the Canons of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. My [probably very ill-formed] belief has developed that the composition of the Canons and their contents are both the works of imperfect men which somehow miraculously became aggregated into works which have held much of this planet's population in thrall for two millenia. Given that the "first" book of the Hebrew Bible, Genesis, was probably completed somewhere near 450BC, and that the priestly writers were still touching up the rest of the Law and the Prophets at about the same time, two millenia is a pretty good compromise.
Why, how did these works by these men, written from either ancient or recent oral histories, some cobbled together with multiple accounts of the same stories -- the flood, Creation, Goliath's slaying, for example, tripping over themselves on the same pages -- survive? The Sojourners say that "hope is believing in spite of the evidence, and watching the evidence change." The only changes we have seen in the evidence actually support the Canons. Go figure.
Corporate trainers are paid handsomely to teach executives to deal with ambiguity in the least destructive ways. Yet the Canons are rife with ambiguity. Accounts vary in time and place among the Gospels. Each of the gospel authors writes from a different tradtion, to a different audience, for a different reason. Yet, the Gospel holds together exceptionally well. The four books of the Gospel are illuminated, but scarcely (perhaps hardly) improved by archeological discoveries. Nobody has found anything to add to or subtract from the four accounts in any significant or credible way.
The old joke about the construction worker explaining that the Thermos jug was the most amazing invention of the twentieth century: "In the winter. before I leave the house, I put in hot coffee and it's hot at lunchtime; in the summer, I put in iced tea and it's cold at lunchtime. How does it know?" How do the Canons hold together so well for so long despite so many efforts to analyze them into shredded misbeliefs?
As they say, God only knows.
9:09:17 PM 
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