Tracy and I are still hooked into our pandemic habits of finding a TV
series we can sit down and binge-watch over the time of a week or two. I would be embarrassed to share with you the number
of movies and series we have burned through in the past year. Tracy estimates that the sectional sofa she
bought just before moving to Sawyer a year and a half ago has aged dramatically
with our butts firmly planted into permanent indentations in now aging sofa
sectional cushions. In pandemic years,
we’ve had it for about 22 years now.
We go from watching escapist, feel-good romps to edge-of-our seat
thrillers and horror movies which we promise we will watch only one more
episode before we go to bed at 1:00 a.m. in the morning. We just finished one of the most moving
series we have seen in some time, “Mare of Easttown.”
Although a good mystery, the series is heart-wrenching in how it shows
the systemic brokenness, the generational trauma, and the deep family pain
found throughout the small village of Easttown, Pennsylvnia. One of the city police officers, Mare
Sheehan, drowns the pain of her police officer-father having completed suicide,
her mentally struggling son having completed suicide, and her ensuing divorce by
emotional cut-off, vaping, and a beer in her hand in almost every scene we see
her. With all the depressing things
happening in the series, I began wondering why I found “Mare of Easttown” so
uplifting? I think the series is powerful
because it realistically portrays systemic, familial, and generational
brokenness, trauma, and pain and yet, how the characters piece together moments
of meaning and joy.
I wanted to watch the show because I saw so many people I respect on
social media share how the show touched something deep within them, gave them a
sense of meaning as we move out of pandemic.
Just three years ago I read a book by early Christian scholars Hal
Taussig and Maia Kotrosits that turned my world upside down. Re-reading the Gospel of Mark Amidst Loss
and Trauma helped me to recognize
the cause and effect of Jesus Christ.
Healings were necessary because poverty, malnutrition, and dire
circumstances were part of everyday life in rural Galilee. Good news of great joy was revelatory in a
time and place rife with family losses, brokenness, violence, and death. Feedings and bread and fish shared were
necessary because food was scarce among a rural populace who were largely
farmers and fisherfolk who had lost their land and their boats.
For the first time in my reading, I recognized the Gospel of Mark as a
powerful portrayal of how Jewish people in First Century Rome moved through
real brokenness, trauma, and pain to experience moments of meaning, and joy.
The word fear, in Greek phobos, is used dozens of times in the
Gospel of Mark--by far more than any other book in the Bible.[1] The Gospel of Mark aches with loss and
trauma, is littered with destruction, undercuts sentimentality, and attends
to the possibility of the good news of piecing together life in the context of
unthinkable loss and brokenness.[2] While I had always read the Gospel of Mark
romantically, too often only seeing Jesus, as I went deeper the gospel revealed
a world around Jesus that should have undercut my sentimentality.[3]
Jesus lived at a time when only a select
few, who were willing to play with the Romans, were able to avoid the everyday
occupation, poverty, and violence that led to demon possession, sickness, and
disease. Day by day, people fell
alongside the road of life as they lost their farms or boats to debt and
experienced the everyday anxiety of where they could find their daily bread and
fish. To not be on the road as a leper,
a paralytic, one possessed, meant life and death. With incredible poverty
outside the Roman halls of power, sickness, deformity, and death became
commonplace. Through its images,
messages, and military and economic power, Rome tried to convey to all peoples
beneath them that life as it was, was as the gods Roma and Jupiter
intended. Ordained by the gods, Rome portrayed
themselves as the right, the true, the virtuous, bringing civilization and
technology to the rest of the broken, occupied, and conquered peoples. Anyone who might be critical of Rome must not have gotten the memo, would need to be quieted for
fear of exposing the cracks in the system.
And in steps the Jesus of the Gospel
of Mark, an exorcist, who expels the Roman occupying army from the land. The whole of Mark’s gospel is resistance
literature—resistance to the Roman gospel which creates sickness, deformity,
and death in the Jewish Galileean countryside.
Rome was the first commercial agrarian empire. Where former empires allowed occupied peoples
to farm their land and give a percentage of the crops on their farms in
tribute, the Roman Empire taxed the people and leveraged their debt until
people who were subsistence farmers became sharecroppers on their own land.
So gospel teaching is replete with
fields, farms, seeds, day laborers, debt, and weeds. Jesus’ teaching asks, “In the midst of such
oppression, loss of land, and occupation, how do day laborers, former farmers,
and sharecroppers make a life for themselves?”
The Jewish people do not own the land, the very thing God had promised. They do not own the field, for growing grain
for daily bread. They do not own the
boats and nets used for fishing to keep themselves and their loved ones
fed. The Biblical stories told the
Jewish people God had given them the land for the welfare of their whole
community. But that was not the
reality. Rome and Caesar owned the land,
the farm, the field, the boats, the nets.
And Caesar only shares the land with those whom Caesar favors.
The other story the Jewish people knew well was the story shared by Ezekiel the prophet. That story was the story of empire. Here is that story detailed in Ezekiel 31, verses 2 through 6.
Mortal, say to Pharaoh
king of Egypt and to his hordes:
Whom are you like in
your greatness?
3 Consider Assyria, a cedar of Lebanon,
with fair branches and forest shade,
and
of great height,
its
top among the clouds.
4 The waters nourished it,
the
deep made it grow tall,
making its rivers flow
around
the place it was planted,
sending forth its streams
to
all the trees of the field.
5 So it towered high
above
all the trees of the field;
its boughs grew large
and
its branches long,
from
abundant water in its shoots.
6 All the birds of the air
made
their nests in its boughs;
under its branches all the animals of the field
gave
birth to their young;
and in its shade
all
great nations lived.
. The metaphor for the great empires of the world is
the mighty Lebanon cedar whose expanse allows birds of every kind to nest and
flourish.[4] The book of Daniel also has a tree of such
magnitude, growing from the center of the earth, Daniel the prophet envisioning
the cedar cut down to suggest the end of the Babylonian Empire.
This mighty, huge tree, the cedar of
Lebanon, would be what Jesus hearers would expect to hear from him. Tell us, they would hope, that we will
reverse and replace the rule of Rome and rival the great empires of the world
in majesty in magnitude. Tell us we will
become the rulers and conquerors, Jesus.
That was the expectation as Jesus began, “The Empire of God is like . .
.” Jesus used such expectations, such
suspended moments in time, to turn images on their heads, to take expectations
into a new Uwe Conrad
possibility. And Jesus says,
“The Empire of God is like a mustard seed.”
A what? A mustard seed? A weed?
A shrub? Early Christian scholar,
John Dominic Crossan, refers to these moments in Jesus’s parables as “the dark
interval,” that moment just before your jaw drops, your mind gets flipped, and
the whole realm of possibility expands.
Pliny the Elder, a historian from the
first century, writes that mustard grows “entirely wild,” and that mustard,
“when it has once been sown it is scarcely possible to get the place free of
it.”[5] Mustard seed is so aggressive in the way it
takes over a field from below that it is thought of as unclean.[6] Mustard is a pungent shrub with dangerous
takeover qualities, perhaps attracting birds during cultivation when birds
might just ruin the intended crop in the field.[7]
Imagine the confluence of those
images in your head. Imagine the choices
Jesus offers the listeners, the possibilities for resistance to the Roman
Empire. You know they own the land. You know their story. It is told to you day after day. And they treat you as unclean, unworthy,
below and powerless. And they treat you
like weeds.
And Jesus chooses a weed, something
unclean, something that works from below.
Live in that image. Know that
God’s activity moves in and through you.
God works in unclean ways? God
acts like a weed? The mustard seed is
not as dominant as it is pervasive, not as over as much as it is under.[8] If you are the one that owns the land, one
might say that a mustard seed very quickly can take over your field, farm or
garden: not with power and violence but
with organic growth, not dominating but pervading, not working from above but
from below, not majestic, not mighty, not noble, not like the cedar of Lebanon.
Jesus turns an Empire image on its
head. Be weeds. For that is how God works in the world.
So this parable should give us pause
about how we see God acting in the world.
Do we justify our own power in the world by suggesting that God has
given us the field? Or do we recognize
that God acts particularly in the place where we are those broken by the world,
those ruptured by trauma and loss?
Because the message of this parable is that God in Christ acts exactly
in those places where we are not part of those who lived the romantic,
sentimental, and charmed life.
This parable is a call for us all to
recognize that God does not affirm worldly power which proclaims other peoples
as unclean, occupied, and unworthy. God
does not allow the empires of the world to proclaim that some are unworthy and
therefore deserve their suffering and poverty which leads to greater sickness,
deformity, and death. In fact, in those
very places where the world names people in that way, names us in that way, God
is working to redeem the field—through weeds.
The good news of the Gospel of Mark
is that our lives do not have to fit some idyllic, romantic, sentimental small
town, picket-fence drama. Rather, God is
often at work in the midst of our divorce, addiction, mental illness, brokenness,
loss, trauma, and pain to carve out moments of community meaning and joy—often
subverting systems and structures that profit off suffering, violence, and
death-dealing.
This parable should give us pause.
If we are cultivating beautiful fields and gardens, winning the game of
life, satisfied and eating off the fat of the land, does that come at someone
else’s expense? Are we reaping the
benefits from the great cedar of empire; or working on an alternative system
and structure from below that might even overrun the field or garden?
As the systems and the structures of the world name us as weeds, Christ
smiles and says, “The Empire of God is like a weed. Grow.
Pervade the field. Nonviolently
work from below. And know that all you
who live in brokenness and violence, pain and generational trauma, are helping
to cobble together a world that is not about the perfect life. Pain and loss may still exist. But imperfect repair can pervade across the
field or farm to bring about an unexpected goodness. And life . . . using some of the broken parts
and new material may even know a God who is divinely active to bring about
repair. That repair may even carry some
of the brokenness in it.”[9] Be like the empire and activity of God. Be a weed.
Amen.
[1]
Kotrosits, Maia., Taussig, Hal. Re-reading
the Gospel of Mark Amidst Loss and Trauma (United
Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 150.
[2]
Ibid, pp. 13, 27,
38.
[3]
Ibid, p. 35.
[4] Ezekiel 31.2-6
[5] Pliny the Elder, Natural History 29.54.170 [Loeb]
[6] William Herzog, Jesus, Justice, and the Reign of God, p.
206
[7] J.D. Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (San
Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993),
pp. 276-279.
[8] Brandon Scott, Re-Imagine the World: An Introduction to the Parables of Jesus (San
Francisco: Polebridge Press, 2001), p.
39.
[9]
Re-reading the
Gospel of Mark,
p. 37.
