The Harmon and Holman Handbook to Literature defines Allegory as “A form of extended metaphor in which objects, persons, and actions in a narrative are equated with meanings that lie outside the narrative itself. Thus, it represents one thing in the guise of another – an abstraction in that of a concrete image. By a process of double signification, the order of words represents actions and characters, and they, in turn, represent ideas” (12). Mark 4:35-41 is heavily allegorical if we read it as narrative. This is not to say the text in no way relates literal events. We must, however, ask ourselves why Mark includes a story such as this in his Gospel. Is it simply to demonstrate the power and authority of Jesus over all nature? Is it simply to give as many events as possible pointing to the divinity of Christ? On one level, Jesus’ calming of the storm is a clear manifestation of His sovereignty over all creation. Yet, through reading the text in abstract terms, readers are able to interpret another spiritual application which is not only representative of Christ’s sovereignty, but also demonstrates the necessity of the test to prove faith. James, the brother of Jesus, states simply “that testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything” (James 1:3-4 NIV). Through the doubleness of the text, the events of the narrative signify, or point to, the text’s application for the reader.
First, as is often the case, it easy to convince ourselves the storm of the text is parallel with trial. Expressions such as the “storms of life” are deeply ingrained in our culture and used to describe the hardships which so often plague our daily experiences. But I draw a careful and important distinction. Trial is not the same as tempt. Trial, as we learn in the Epistle of James is God’s way of proving our faith or producing genuineness within us. Temptation comes from within and is not part of God’s nature. James writes that we are “tempted when, by [our] own evil desire, [we] are dragged away and enticed” (James 1:14 NIV). This suggests that the disciples’ reaction to the experience in the boat was not the product of internal desire but the common and usual way most of us deal with God’s trials in our own life. It is not uncommon for us to become overwhelmed by daily trials. And when we think that we have experienced the worst, another wave comes crashing down upon us. It is not peculiar for us to cry out “Teacher, don’t you care if we die?” It is not peculiar for us feel that Jesus is unaware of the situation and doubt His sincerity.
Second, and slightly more difficult, is recognizing the difference between the wind and the waves. We must remember that wind causes waves and the only way to overcome the devastating effects of most waves is to turn and face them. Allegorically speaking it is the wind which signifies the trial or the test. The waves speak to all those things which must be overcome along the way to successfully complete the test or overcome the trial. It is when we give into fear and try and run or turn sideways to the force bearing down us is when we experience the full fury of the storm. And it is not surprising that waves inspire fear. The ocean in literature often represents the perilous, the unknown. It human nature to fear what we do not know and any experience which presents danger we avoid. The disciples fear is an understandable product of the waves. The waves present to us all those things which we would rather not deal with; those things which bring with them the greatest difficulty and hardship. Yet, it is the waves which we must face and overcome to fully realize God’s purpose for any trial. Waves can be flaws which God wishes to mend. Waves can weakness which God wishes to turn to strengths. Waves can be sin which God wishes to purge from our lives. We all have waves but it takes a strong wind to make them recognizable.
Wind makes waves. This is a common truth we on windy days at the beach or in the storms which occasionally batter our shores. The wind, however, is not the malicious force which it appears to be in this text. Wind is often related the breath in literature and, breath in the bible, often represents God. We must realize that it is not uncommon for God to stir our souls and challenge our faith. Every once in awhile God must send a good blow to make us recognize those areas which we neglect. Any time the wind causes rough seas the beach is littered with all those things the wind was able to remove from the sea by stirring it up. The wind of Mark 4:35-41 makes very real the disciples lack of faith. The storm was not meant to destroy but highlight what would be necessary for them to complete what God intended for them to do. They would need faith and the needed a good storm to stir it up.
Every storm needs a boat, a simple truth of life. If no one is there to witness the magnificent furry of the storm than the storm has no significance, no one to bear witness to it. Thus, the boat in this storm is the representation of the body of the one who must experience the furry of the storm to understand its significance. Shakespeare give insight to my meaning: “In one little body/ Thou counterfeit’st a bark, as sea, a wind,/ For still thy eyes, which I may call the sea,/ Do ebb and flow with tears. The bark thy body is,/ Sailing in this salt flood. The winds thy sighs,/ Who, raging with they tears, and they with them,/ Without sudden calm will overset/ Thy tempest-tossed body” (Romeo and Julite Act 3:5.130-137). Very often God’s tests are internal. The disciples’ experience of an external force produced internal results. I, however, find that God’s tries me with spiritual or emotional circumstances to motivate me to produce external results. The storm, therefore, rages within me and my body is the “bark” tossed by a spiritual tempest. Much like Juliet is driven to her destruction by emotive forces, God’s tests can toss us about so violently that we may feel overset by the storm. This suggests that God’s tests are never easy. I Corinthians 3:13 state that “fire will test the quality of each man’s work” (NIV). Fire burns! Fire purges! Fire refines! The hotter the fire, the pure we become. And isn’t this the goal, “to be complete, lacking nothing.”
Every boat needs a pilot. Because the boat is a representation of us, some other object, event, or person in the text must represent that force which directs the boat. The only viable option is a sleeping Jesus. And this furthers the implications test. Often, as stated earlier, we feel that God is absent, asleep, and unaware of our circumstance and we cry “don’t you care.” Paradoxically, the opposite is true. Often, it is God who sends the test and logically this would make Him very present, awake, and aware of our trial. I have a feeling that Jesus only slept to see what the disciples would do. He needed to know exactly where they were so that He could continue to grow them. And isn’t this the role of a test, finding out exactly where we are? Once the disciples responded to the test, Jesus knew what they lacked and He knew exactly what he had to do next. Tests work the same way for us if we are open to receiving the results. Often, the test sheds light on our weakness and God teaches us what we need to do to fix it.
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Was the Sabbath Created?
C.S. Lewis writes "Our faith in Christ wavers not so much when real arguments come against it as when it it looks improbable -- when the whole world takes on that desolate look which really tells us much more about the state of our passions and even our digestion than about reality (Christian Reflections, Religion: Reality or Substitute). Simply put, faith becomes difficult when we are forced into those moments of self-reflection and solitude which cause us to question the foundations upon which our faith is built. It is easy to believe, as T. S. Eliot posits, when we are persecuted. Persecution makes faith easy. But when our faith comes under attack as a result of our own expectations and ideological definitions of who and what God is, then we are shaken to the core of our spiritual identity. We have all been in these situational trials created by our expectation of when, where and how God is to manifest Himself or rescue us from the tribulation at hand. However, God rarely works according to our expectations. In the Gospels, the Pharisees are taught this lesson on a continuous basis. Their constant attempts to entrap Jesus are not foiled by Jesus' ability to legally reason His way out of each difficult situation, but by clear and defined demonstrations of His manifest power over all things. In front of their eyes, He demonstrates His Messiahship.
Why would the Pharisees find Jesus' demonstrations of power and authority so very troubling? I find the answer very simple and yet full meaningful displacement and mystification. The simple answer is this: The Pharisees were upset simply because Jesus highlighted the limitations of their authority and power. They could not heal nor had they the power to undo the physical and spiritual constraints of the law. Jesus' ability to heal the man with the withered hand in Mark 3:1-6 and the posited question, "Which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save a life or to kill?" emphasize the fact the Pharisees have the power to do neither save nor kill; do good nor do evil. They only have the power to continue to limit the Divine intention of Sabbath rest. They cannot pass law nor define work in such a way as to inspire men to right action. Their constant defining and redefining lead only to the increasing burden, under which, no one is found righteous. In this way, the Sabbath rest becomes a god which must be appeased through stillness and a lack of spiritual productivity. In the legalistic mind of the Pharisees, man was created for the Sabbath.
In contrast, Jesus demonstrates that neither the Pharisees nor those present have a clear understanding of Divine intent. The imperative at the end of Mark 2, "The Sabbath was created for man, not man for the Sabbath" makes clear the intent of Sabbath rest. God did not created a day of rest to limit spiritual productivity. The simple fact that the day had been so heavily weighted with restrictions removed such possibility. Yet, Sabbath was created for man implying that man has some power over the day. The day is therefore a day for man to be reflective, contemplative, and focus on Him who has made all things by the utterance of His Word. The day is intended for spiritual productivity and how we are spiritually productive is, in some way, left to us to define. In this way, as is intended, Sabbath becomes a freeing day, a small realization of the freedom we might experience through Christ, and not another day of legal bondage.
Now, an attempt at the hard answer; the one which some commentators shy away from simply because it's really no answer at all. (Perhaps this answer is even sinful? Who knows?) So here it goes: within the context of the Roman occupation of Israel and rule of King Herod, the Jew hopefully awaited the coming of a promised Messiah who comes in glory as a king and to rescue and restore them to the promised land under Messianic rule. This preconception or expectation of who the Messiah is to be and be like created an allegory for which the Pharisees patiently waited for. Paul De Man, a Belgian deconstructionist, writes in Rhetoric and Temporality allegory demystifies and creates metonymic enjambments which are clearly meant to signify "this is that." Yet, Jesus does fit into these neat and tidy allegorical categories which the Pharisees so eagerly created to make the identification of the Messiah a logical sight based process. Jesus did not come to meet their expectations. He was not the part which came to represent the whole of their preconceived notions of Messiah. The incarnation did not happen so that the Law and the Prophets might be justified but fulfilled. Jesus came to show the inadequacies of the Mossaic legal system which could not justify men who could meet the expectations of God. He wasn't as simple as they wanted Him to be.
Jesus came more as a symbol. Symbols, unlike allegory according to De Mann, by nature are fragmentary and often decenter or displace their meaning. Symbols become synecdochal representations. These synecdochal representation, unlike allegory, serve only to mystify, fragment and displace what we hope to be easily understood. In this case, who the Messiah is. Yet, the Pharisees are unable to draw the connection between the incarnate Christ who rules the universe as the Messiah simply because they were looking for a man to come in and kick out the Romans. Their allegory only allowed them to accept strict human constructions and ideals of kingship when they needed to be asserting the loose and unstable enjambments of symbol. Instead of fighting telling the Jewish community when "this" comes it will look like "that" they should have concluded when "this" comes we don't know what "that" will look like, but we will know when we see it. For this reason, they killed the "that" they had been waiting for. They killed Him because He did not meet their expectation simply because He did not come as representative equivalent but as a representative part of a whole.
For modern day readers of fundamental belief, there is little question who Jesus is. For others, their expectations of Jesus quickly subverts Who and what He represents. They have created tidy allegorical pictures of the benevolent Shepard carrying the lamb and have missed out on the factual Christ. Like the Pharisees, we cannot limit Christ to what we think He ought to be and manifestations of His power to what we want them to be. Jesus Christ manifests Himself in our live in very real, and relevant ways on a daily basis. We won't always get His love. Sometimes it will be His reproach, correction, or punishment, but this Him none the less. We must be able to couple our faith with reason and sight to see Him at work in every area of our lives; even the areas we don't want Him to work on. We must avoid letting the Pharisee in all of us kill the work of Jesus in our lives before it is finished simply because it is not being done the way we expected.
But, in the end, I'm just sayin' is all.
Why would the Pharisees find Jesus' demonstrations of power and authority so very troubling? I find the answer very simple and yet full meaningful displacement and mystification. The simple answer is this: The Pharisees were upset simply because Jesus highlighted the limitations of their authority and power. They could not heal nor had they the power to undo the physical and spiritual constraints of the law. Jesus' ability to heal the man with the withered hand in Mark 3:1-6 and the posited question, "Which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save a life or to kill?" emphasize the fact the Pharisees have the power to do neither save nor kill; do good nor do evil. They only have the power to continue to limit the Divine intention of Sabbath rest. They cannot pass law nor define work in such a way as to inspire men to right action. Their constant defining and redefining lead only to the increasing burden, under which, no one is found righteous. In this way, the Sabbath rest becomes a god which must be appeased through stillness and a lack of spiritual productivity. In the legalistic mind of the Pharisees, man was created for the Sabbath.
In contrast, Jesus demonstrates that neither the Pharisees nor those present have a clear understanding of Divine intent. The imperative at the end of Mark 2, "The Sabbath was created for man, not man for the Sabbath" makes clear the intent of Sabbath rest. God did not created a day of rest to limit spiritual productivity. The simple fact that the day had been so heavily weighted with restrictions removed such possibility. Yet, Sabbath was created for man implying that man has some power over the day. The day is therefore a day for man to be reflective, contemplative, and focus on Him who has made all things by the utterance of His Word. The day is intended for spiritual productivity and how we are spiritually productive is, in some way, left to us to define. In this way, as is intended, Sabbath becomes a freeing day, a small realization of the freedom we might experience through Christ, and not another day of legal bondage.
Now, an attempt at the hard answer; the one which some commentators shy away from simply because it's really no answer at all. (Perhaps this answer is even sinful? Who knows?) So here it goes: within the context of the Roman occupation of Israel and rule of King Herod, the Jew hopefully awaited the coming of a promised Messiah who comes in glory as a king and to rescue and restore them to the promised land under Messianic rule. This preconception or expectation of who the Messiah is to be and be like created an allegory for which the Pharisees patiently waited for. Paul De Man, a Belgian deconstructionist, writes in Rhetoric and Temporality allegory demystifies and creates metonymic enjambments which are clearly meant to signify "this is that." Yet, Jesus does fit into these neat and tidy allegorical categories which the Pharisees so eagerly created to make the identification of the Messiah a logical sight based process. Jesus did not come to meet their expectations. He was not the part which came to represent the whole of their preconceived notions of Messiah. The incarnation did not happen so that the Law and the Prophets might be justified but fulfilled. Jesus came to show the inadequacies of the Mossaic legal system which could not justify men who could meet the expectations of God. He wasn't as simple as they wanted Him to be.
Jesus came more as a symbol. Symbols, unlike allegory according to De Mann, by nature are fragmentary and often decenter or displace their meaning. Symbols become synecdochal representations. These synecdochal representation, unlike allegory, serve only to mystify, fragment and displace what we hope to be easily understood. In this case, who the Messiah is. Yet, the Pharisees are unable to draw the connection between the incarnate Christ who rules the universe as the Messiah simply because they were looking for a man to come in and kick out the Romans. Their allegory only allowed them to accept strict human constructions and ideals of kingship when they needed to be asserting the loose and unstable enjambments of symbol. Instead of fighting telling the Jewish community when "this" comes it will look like "that" they should have concluded when "this" comes we don't know what "that" will look like, but we will know when we see it. For this reason, they killed the "that" they had been waiting for. They killed Him because He did not meet their expectation simply because He did not come as representative equivalent but as a representative part of a whole.
For modern day readers of fundamental belief, there is little question who Jesus is. For others, their expectations of Jesus quickly subverts Who and what He represents. They have created tidy allegorical pictures of the benevolent Shepard carrying the lamb and have missed out on the factual Christ. Like the Pharisees, we cannot limit Christ to what we think He ought to be and manifestations of His power to what we want them to be. Jesus Christ manifests Himself in our live in very real, and relevant ways on a daily basis. We won't always get His love. Sometimes it will be His reproach, correction, or punishment, but this Him none the less. We must be able to couple our faith with reason and sight to see Him at work in every area of our lives; even the areas we don't want Him to work on. We must avoid letting the Pharisee in all of us kill the work of Jesus in our lives before it is finished simply because it is not being done the way we expected.
But, in the end, I'm just sayin' is all.
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