DEAR CHARITY

Part 6

Dear Charity,

Your last email was such an incredible encouragement to me.  I know your heart is still almost unimaginably heavy, but I was more happy than I can express to hear you tell me that you aren’t giving up.  We are most definitely in this fight together, my dear friend and sister.

I gotta admit that non-verbal, non-face-to-face communication always seems slightly awkward to me, especially in cases like this where me plunking forward might seem insensitive.  You said you felt ready to move on to Mark, though, and I trust you.  I think you know this but sometimes it’s good to have the other person say it (or write it, as the case may be) — nothing is ever a closed topic, okay?  We barely even scratched the surface of everything Job has to say to us, so if you want or need to revisit that book or anything we’ve already talked about at any time, that’s totally cool with me.

Pretty sure I mentioned this before, but in case I didn’t, just wanted to say that Mark is my favorite Gospel.  I guess maybe it has to do with my personality as much as anything else.  It’s straightforward, it’s to the point, it’s fast-paced.  In other words, pretty much everything I’m not.  And Jesus speaks bold truth without mincing words.  He says what needs to be said in some of the most direct ways possible, a quality I greatly admire and wish I possessed.  Jesus in Mark is full of emotion, too, and so many times it’s not the emotions and feelings we normally like to associate with Him.  That appeals to me because it forces me to stop and think about my ideas about Jesus and question whether or not I’m relying more on tradition and church doctrine than what the Bible actually says.

One of the first things that stands out to me about Mark is that his opening  sentence seems to imply that the Gospel begins right where he says it does, that nothing that came before had anything to do with the Gospel and that Jesus had nothing to do with anything that came before Him.  It almost feels like it takes Jesus completely out of context and sort of plops Him down in the middle of history so that people would be right when they talk about Him as if He had no connection with Israel in any way and everything He said He just sort of came up with out of the blue, and I gotta say, that whole way of looking at the Gospel and at Jesus is such a sad by-product of Mark’s choice of words, one that I don’t think he intended at all.  And wow, was that a run-on sentence of some magnitude.  I hope it wasn’t too stream of consciousness to follow.

I realize that every story has a beginning, and Mark had some specific things he wanted to get across to people about Jesus.  What I think I always missed about Mark is that he really did connect everything.  He straight up declares that the beginning of the good news of Jesus came from Isaiah.  Far from saying that Jesus popped into history out of nowhere, Mark is putting him firmly within Israel’s history and giving us a sort of shorthand for everything that came before Him.  Jesus Himself made it abundantly clear that He was doing something new while at the same time grounding everything He did within the framework of what God had already given Israel.  Once I realized that, it absolutely changed how I read the rest of Mark.

So one thing I never really understood about Jesus was why He was forever telling people not to say anything about Him.  I was talking to a good friend recently, though, and we were musing about how much fame messes most people up.  Suddenly, it all clicked.  I think it’s entirely possible that part of why He did that was that He was doing His best to prevent Himself from falling into the temptation of fame.  I’ve also read that He didn’t want word about Him spreading too fast and gain Him the attention of the Jewish leadership before the time was right.  I kinda think the two dovetail quite nicely together.  Mark points out that Jesus had to stick to unfrequented places after a man He healed spread the word about Him way too effectively, which lends a certain credence to my supposition.  Plus, if He was an introvert, as I am more and more convinced that He was, it makes even more sense that He wouldn’t want all eyes on Him all the time.

See, that’s yet another one of the reasons why I love, love Mark’s Gospel.  Something about the way he wrote it presents Jesus in a manner that really invites me to look at Him as a human being, a real flesh and blood human being, not some super human who had it all together and didn’t in any way struggle with, you know, life.  Thinking about Jesus being susceptible to something like the lure of fame puts Him on a whole different level for me, and that helps keep certain thoughts at bay, like, “There’s no way I could say that to Jesus...He’d never understand what I was talking about.”

Another thing that has always stood out to me in Mark is that Jesus just antagonized the living daylights out of the Jewish leadership.  I know all the Gospels paint much the same picture, but there’s just something about how Mark presents Him, you know?  Take a look at chapter two.  It’s just one huge confrontation with the leadership and the traditions Israel had come to identify itself by.  What did God intend for Israel in the first place?  Mindless obedience?  Blind faith?  I think Jesus is giving a BIG thumbs down to those ideas with each and every action He takes from forgiving and healing the paralytic to partying with the “sinners” to not fasting to doing something forbidden on Shabbat.  It’s like He was fairly shouting that every action needs to be motivated by a true and deep love for God based on a true and deep understanding of God’s heart, not just rote obedience for the sake of obedience.

Jesus really kept it up with the subversion of expectation and tradition, and it got the leadership pretty hot under the collar, no?  But man, plotting to destroy someone is a pretty severe reaction no matter what that person said.  The rage of the Jewish leadership was all-consuming.  And if I think about it in relation to what God said to Israel through His prophets, it makes total sense that even though God was standing right there in front of them in the flesh, they were still unyielding.

I’ve heard people say in the past that if God would just bust out with a heavy rotation of signs and wonders today, sooo many people would be knocking the doors down to get into the kingdom.  But if there’s anything to be learned from the Bible, it’s that human nature never, ever changes.  What makes us think that if God in the flesh wasn’t able to sway the hearts of the most stubborn and rebellious with all the jaw-dropping miracles He did that ramping up the number of astounding works would be enough to get people to see the light?  In a way, it almost feels like that’s part of what Mark was saying.  No matter how many miracles some people see, their hearts are going to stay put in the rebellion camp.

Kinda reminds me of my dad, in a way.  He used to tell me a story about when he and his sister were kids and she got this incredibly rare virus and they really thought she was gonna die.  I guess my grandpa prayed for her and next thing you know, she’s running around the hospital like nothing was ever wrong with her.  Doctors couldn’t figure it out and everyone called it a miracle.  My dad’s takeaway from that?  God couldn’t be trusted because He answered the prayers of a man who beat the blessed tar out of him on a consistent basis but never once answered his prayers to be rescued from my grandpa.

Don’t get me wrong, I really do understand why my dad had a problem with God because of that, and truth be told, that’s where a whole lot of my own problems stem from.  I guess my point is that it’s never as simple as showing someone a miracle and expecting them to see the grandeur of God and fall at His feet in worship.  There’s way too much going on in our hearts and minds for it to be so cut and dried.  Something it seems like a fair number people in the church have forgotten is that we’re not spirits housed in flesh.  You can’t just appeal to the “spirit” in a person and think they’ll respond like you want them to or think they should.  We are complex beings made in the image of a complex Being, and if all we focus on is what we’ve termed the “spiritual” aspects of our lives, we will forever be trapped in a prison that doesn’t quite seem to make sense.  As you well know from your own experiences and everything you’re trying to navigate, we ignore the mental and emotional aspects of our persons only to our own detriment.  If you’re not working on every single thing that makes you, you...yeah, well, we both know what that looks like.

Maybe that’s yet another reason why I connect so well with how Mark writes about Jesus.  Mark gives Him real emotions and feelings that real people actually feel.  There’s no sense of a two-dimensional Jesus in Mark.  Not at all.  He wasn’t just a spirit walking around in temporary flesh and blood.  He was a man of intense passion and emotion and feeling.  I absolutely love how Mark relates the story about the guy with the withered hand in chapter 3.

He entered again into the synagogue, and there was a man there who had his hand withered.  They watched Him, whether He would heal him on the Sabbath day, that they might accuse Him.

He said to the man who had his hand withered, “Stand up.”  He said to them, “Is it lawful on the Sabbath day to do good, or to do harm?  To save a life, or to kill?”  But they were silent.

When He had looked around at them with anger, being grieved at the hardening of their hearts, He said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.”  He stretched it out, and his hand was restored as healthy as the other.  The Pharisees went out, and immediately conspired with the Herodians against Him, how they might destroy Him.

Jesus was angry.  He was grieved.  Other translations use the words “deeply upset” and “exasperated” to describe how He was feeling.  That’s most definitely not the tolerant, warm and fuzzy Jesus that I was raised on.  And here’s the thing, too — Mark makes sure that we know He was angry at the men and not just angry at their actions.  I was raised to believe that God might be mad at actions, but He would never, ever be mad at the person doing those actions.  God hates the sin but loves the sinner, right?  Well, Mark makes no bones about the truth that Jesus was angry at the people themselves as well as their actions.  He knew exactly how it felt to be proclaiming the truth to people who refused to listen, and He didn’t try to censor Himself or say that it wasn’t godly to be angry at people.  That is very much a Jesus I can relate to.

So why was Jesus that angry with the Jewish leadership?  He was angry at them because they had done such a good job at convincing themselves they were absolutely and without question right about God and what He desired.  They had a handle on God and not even God Himself could tell them any differently.  They rejected even the possibility that they could be wrong in the way they saw God, and their hearts were closed to considering anything other than what they thought.  And when God stood right in front of them clothed in flesh and blood, all they wanted to do was trap Him and destroy Him.

That actually makes me think back to Job and his friends, you know?  I have no doubt that Job’s friends (and even Job himself) thought they knew what God was all about, like the Jewish leadership of Jesus’ day, and then weren’t they flabbergasted when — surprise!  Turns out that’s not what God was about all along.

I know I sometimes like to think that if I had lived in Jesus’ day and was in the position of the Jewish leadership, I’d totally get it and be all, “Yay, Jesus!”  But as I said before, human nature hasn’t changed one iota and I’m thinking it’d be more than likely that I would be more along the lines of, “You’re messing with all these comfortable expectations and traditions we’ve come up with over the years and we are sooo not happy with that.  Or You...God.”

I guess along those same lines, you gotta look at Mary, too.  I mean, she had an actual angel speak to her on behalf of God, telling her that the miracle she was going to conceive would be the true King of Israel.  I don’t think that’s the kind of thing that just slips your mind even as you get older.  “Yeah, there was something that went down right before I had my first kid but the details are a bit fuzzy...”  Not gonna happen.  But look at what she did after Jesus went public.  She thought her son was off His ever-lovin’ rocker and wanted to “take control of Him” (other translations say they wanted to restrain Him, and that certainly gives me the picture of a nice, white jacket in a nice, padded room...).  Not even an angel’s visit could keep her from doubting the very son she had been told was Israel’s salvation.  Like I said before, signs and wonders and miracles will never be the only thing we can depend on to inspire faith and belief, and they most certainly aren’t enough to maintain our faith and belief.

All that seems to dovetail pretty well with what Mark wrote in chapter 4.  There are a ton of agricultural references, ending with the question about faith, making me think that the kingdom is, in large part, about the soil the seed is planted in — but it’s also about what seed is being planted.  Only when the right seed (the kingdom) is planted in the right soil (faith) will good fruit be produced.  And while sometimes, we won’t see the growth, if the conditions are right, growth will happen.  Equally true, on the other hand, is the reality that a person can look like a beautiful, healthy tree on the outside and yet be full of nothing but rot.  Or, they can be producing fruit but that fruit is actually poisonous because the soil isn’t healthy.  Because if our faith begins to veer towards ideas we have about God rather than what God says about Himself, kind of like Job’s fiends, the Jewish leadership, and maybe even Mary, that’s gonna mean we’re in serious danger of producing fruit that could potentially make people sick or maybe even kill them instead of nourishing them.

I know we’ve talked a good bit about this in the past, but I am reminded yet again of my struggle with understanding the difference between truly knowing God and just knowing a whole lot of things about Him.  It seems to me that when Jesus asked His disciples, “Do you not yet have faith?” He was really asking them, “Don’t you guys know Me, yet?”  That’s really what it all boils down to.  Do we know God or do we just know some cool, helpful things about Him?

People like you and me, Charity, we got a majorly bum deal in the parental department and like we’ve said, that’s colored every single thing about how we see God.  I sorta feel sorry for my dad in a way, though, because he tried really hard at one point to have a relationship with God, he simply never connected to dots between how much his own cruddy and abusive father affected how he thought about and related to God.  And so he just gave up.  I wish so badly that someone had told him (and me, for that matter) just how monumentally important it is to confront your past and the things that happened to you if you ever hope to move forward with God in your present.  Truth is, way too many people told my dad (and me) that all you had to do was let go and let God and then you’d be good to go.  Struggle with something?  Must be your own lack of faith.  Couldn’t be the decades of abuse you suffered at the hands of a cruel creep.  I’m sure that had absolutely nothing to do with anything.  Just pray more and read your Bible more and God will fix you.

Except that sometimes it doesn’t work that way, as you and I are all too aware.  I know I probably haven’t said this nearly enough, but I am so, so, very glad that you are choosing to walk the path you’re on even though it’s seemed actually unbearable at times and you’ve seriously questioned whether or not it was even worth it.  I can’t tell you what the other side will look like for you, I can’t even fully say what it looks like for me, yet, either.  But for you and me, this is the journey we need to take and I am here to walk every single step with you.  And because He promised it would be so, I can say with confidence that Jesus is as well.  Not just warm fuzzy Jesus, but the Jesus who felt angry and exasperated with people, the Jesus who knew and understood exactly what it was like to struggle with everything that we feel.  And I don’t know about you, but I think that Jesus is one worth holding onto with every atom of my being.

Hand in hand with my passionate Jesus,

Beth