endlesslyrocking
a meditation on mark 4.35-41, part 1 - clearing the decks
posted 19 February 2008, Tuesday
If you attend a church long enough, you will eventually have to endure a sermon on Mark 4.35-41, the tale at sea where Jesus calms the storm of wind and water. I say endure advisedly, dear reader, because in my years I have yet to hear a sermon that doesn't, if you'll pardon the expression, water down both the storm and Jesus himself. 'Jesus will still your storms,' I've heard over and over again - indeed, I heard it just the other day from a fellow at a local seminary - those 'storms' being, well, rather mundane affairs like burst water pipes, ballooning mortgages, failed marriages. Surely there are texts abounding in Scripture wherein we are called upon to 'cast our cares upon him,' but I submit that this isn't one of them. No, my friends, to anticipate what's to come, this much bowdlerized, sentimentalized passage gives us one of the many theophanies in Mark's gospel, and like the others directs our gaze at Jesus himself as God manifest in the flesh.
So, one may ask, how has this text yielded a trite, brittle fabrication of lazy preachers and their benumbed congregations? I must confess, I have no answer to that question, but I have taken a look at some of the classic interpretations of the text, which have the boat figuring the Church and the storm the persecutions and insults the Church must bear on her pilgrimage, and I have looked in some detail at the passage itself. I will, thus, proceed in that order.
It is convenient to start with Tertullian's treatise On Baptism, composed sometime around 198 AD*. I will then glance at Augustine's all-too-brief sermon on this text, to show that, while he seems to subjectivize the text, he really doesn't. Then, in part 2 I'll turn to the pericope itself, to see just what's going on as Jesus sleeps through one hell of a perfect storm on the Sea of Galilee. Then, finally, I will return to the older interpretations, to see what I can make of 'em in light of my admittedly amateurish attempt at exegesis. To that end, without any more ado, let's hie us to Tertullian.
Tertullian seeks in chapter 12 of On Baptism to refute those who dispute the necessity of baptism to salvation. It seems these opponents asserted that the apostles, with the exception of Paul, were not baptized, and thus the necessity for the rest of us is thrown out of bounds. Tertullian's arguments, interesting though they are, don't concern me here. I only note that his identification of our Markan ship as a figure for the Church comes almost as an afterthought. He notes that some have made the absurd suggestion that the apostles found themselves, as it were, baptized by accident as 'they were sprinkled and covered with the waves.' Nonsense, he says, because it's one thing to be drenched by a storm at sea, and quite another to be baptized in accordance with Christ's institution and following his command. Tertullian does, however, concede that the 'little ship did present a figure of the Church,' for, he writes, 'she is disquieted "in the sea," that is, by persecutions and temptations.' He goes on like so: 'the lord, through patience, sleeping as it were, until, roused in their last extremities by the prayers of the saints, He checks the world, and restores tranquility to His own' (Roberts, 675). So much Tertullian as a locus classicus for the Boat as floating Church.
Tertullian, no matter what one thinks of his assertion, still recalls that our story has little to do with the common, everyday troubles 'the flesh is heir to.' My beloved Augustine continues in this vein, although it seems at first as though he is only concerned with the most subjective and emotive response to the story. You see, Augustine maintains the theme of pilgrimage through the world we find laconically figured in Tertullian. Before I get to that, on with Augustine himself. What does he have to say?**
His sermon on this passage is freakishly brief, and no manuscripts of it exist anywhere that we know of (Rotelle 174, n. 1). It seems to have been delivered some time between, say, 415 and 425 - that's precision, you know. Well, to get to the point, Augustine tells his congregation that 'even the sleep of Christ is a sign and sacred symbol [sacramentum]' (173), because Paul himself has said that Christ may dwell in each of them through faith (with reference to Eph 3.17). He goes on to say that the 'people sailing in the boat are souls crossing the present age on a paltry piece of wood (Wis 10.4)' (173)***. We reach the heart of Augustine's homily when he exhorts his people to 'wake Christ up,' because 'Christ is asleep in you.' Here is the text in full:
'You have heard an insult - it's a high wind; you've gotten angry - it's a wave. So, as the wind blows and the waves break, the boat is in peril, your heart is in peril, your heart is tossed about. When you hear the insult, you are eager to avenge it; you do avenge it, and by giving way to someone else's evil, you suffer shipwreck. And why is that? Because Christ is asleep in you. What does it mean, that Christ is asleep in you? That you have forgotten Christ. So wake Christ up, remember Christ; let Christ stay awake in you, think about him.'
What's more, the 'memory of him is his word; the memory of him is his command' (173).
To tease this out a bit requires that I ramble through a bit more than just Augustine's smalle sermone. You see, to remember Christ is not simply a matter of thinking on him in some free-floating way, but to call to mind his word, especially through the meditation of Scripture. Recall that for Augustine, Scripture is ‘for now the face of God,' and we are to ‘melt before it' as we would before God himself face to face. To read Scripture, especially the words and commands of Christ, is therefore the way we obey the command to ‘seek his face always,' as Augustine himself says in the opening of his classic De Trinitate. That whole work, in fact, can be seen in one perspective as a long and, by Augustine's own admission in book fifteen, an ultimately failed attempt to recollect the person and work of the Trinity as manifest in Christ himself.
So, through constant meditation on the Scriptures, one recalls to memory Christ himself, his person and his work, and thus ‘wakes Christ up' in one's heart. In this way one will, say, respond to insult and persecution with kindness and prayer for the evil-doer's well-being, in accord with Christ's command and with his own actions. One will, in this way, be more Christ-like as one exercises one's memory in such meditation and action. Given the key role memory plays in Augustine's understanding of will and affection and suchlike, this proves a key to the playing out of operative grace in the life of the believer through time. That's a complicated matter that needn't detain me here. I only point all this out to show that Augustine's sermon on our passage, while short and seemingly moralistic, grows out of a dense web of reflection, recollection, and polemic on the nature of the will, memory, and desire, freedom and grace, and the Trinity in his economy. In short, while Augustine deals not so much with the boat as the Church, but with the particular sailors as particular souls moving through this world, he doesn't really subjectivize the text so much as place each particular soul in a complex set of relations without which it would have no substance at all. As with so much in Augustine, therefore, this sermon is far from being as simple as it seems.
So much my two examples of classic exegesis, at least in the West. Basil will appear later, and Tertullian will return for an encore, but for now, I want to pause and reflect for a second on this notion of the boat as Church, and the storm as the persecutions and shocks the Church is heir to in this fallen life.
Since Tertullian's mention of the boat as Church is offhand, and even a concession at that point in his argument, it has the feel of something of a tradition even that early stage in the history of interpretation. Given that Mark's gospel itself didn't attract much attention, this ‘Church as Boat' allegory probably comes from the reception history of Matthew and Luke, but it is applied to Mark as well. Moreover, Augustine's treatment is subtly different. Both reveal a strong tendency to see Jesus as, of course, divine, although there is no attempt in either case to tease out the evidence in the passage itself for Jesus' identification with YHWH [although, see below, when we all too briefly call Tertullian back from obscurity once again; to give a hint]. No, Jesus is assumed to be divine, and as such the proper subject of such actions as bringing tranquilitas to the world so that the Church might have a respite from persecution. What's more, that Jesus could with his word still a violent storm on the sea is not open to question - the allegory worked from the story itself reflects an extrapolation of that insight. Now, I've been, so far, reasonably positive in my assessment of all this, but I have to say that something has been bothering me all along. Not so much the interpretations themselves in their motivations and results - indeed, given the assumptions of the interpreters, I can't have much of a problem with ‘em. They confess that Jesus is the Son of God made Man, and that he got into a boat with the disciples, and calmed a deadly storm, and that power and mercy give them the warrant to spin an allegorical extrapolation to the life of the Church in toto, or the particular souls within the Church who must make their way through the world. No no no, I don't question these men as to their motives, and the allegories don't bother me, at least in principle.
That, dear reader, is the rub, don't you know. Regardless of their motives, regardless of the warrants for their allegorical whimsy, I can see even at this early stage in the Church's history of interpretation a subtle, hidden danger. They have, you see, taken their gaze from Jesus himself - at least in the examples offered here, we find that Jesus himself, in his person and work, is not the primary subject or object of reflection. The Church has become, if you will, the center of action, and, largely because they could take for granted who Jesus is and what he does, Jesus becomes kind of instrumental to the life of the Church. In this allegorical reading, I can see how it takes just a nudge - or, perhaps, a violent shove - and, voila, you get the bland reading so beloved by contemporary preachers and their congregations.
How so, you ask? Well, consider - if Jesus is instrumental to the Church in some way, as providing some kind of peaceful passage through a stormy world, say, then if you find yourself in an age that has forgotten, on purpose, just who Jesus is and what he does, then it's not too difficult to imagine forgetting the ecclesiocentric reading offered by our reverend fathers. That is, you can even eliminate the particularity of the Church herself, and make Jesus the instrument of your desire for a trouble-free, comfy existence. He then becomes the solution to your many and varied problems as you navigate [nautical!] this complex contemporary society. Thus, Jesus your fuzzy friend will help you out of any jam, calm your nerves, and steady your hand so that you can get on with life without too much trouble and with some assurance of success. Jesus will, don't you know, still your storms.
That Jesus, in Mark, has promised that those who have renounced, say, family, home, friends, and the like for his sake, will receive a hundred-fold in recompense by way of their membership in the Church, along with persecutions, is here completely forgotten. In fact, the desire to steer clear of persecutions itself becomes problematic. Still, it's not wrong, as Scripture attests over and over again, to hope and pray that persecutions might relent for the sake of our brothers and sisters who suffer so. All the same, we are promised persecution in one form or another. [Who knows if blissful indifference to Jesus and his gospel, and the co-opting of that gospel for the gratification of the Market and the State, might not be a subtle form of persecution we endure with our supposed ‘freedom of religion.']. In any case, while the likes of Tertullian and Augustine are not at all responsible for our own post-Enlightenment stupidity, we need to be wary of using their interpretations without further ado, because even our various churches are busy about the task of forgetting who Jesus really is and what he really does. In such a place and time, allegory can't trump typology, and we must all the more strenuously fight what David Farrow calls the ‘methodological principle' of ‘taking our eyes off Jesus.'
To that end, in part 2 I'll look at the passage in some detail, with attention ever and always focused on Jesus. To anticipate, I wish for us all to ‘fear a great fear' when we consider who Jesus is. To that end, the question of the disciples will be ours as well: ‘Who 'Who then is this, seeing that even the wind and the sea obey him?'
* You can find, dear reader, On Baptism in Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, eds. 1986. Latin Christianity: Its Founder, Tertullian. The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 3 (rpt. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans)., pgs 669-679. Detailed arguments for a chronology of Tertullian's writings can be found in Timothy Barnes, Tertullian: A Historical and Literary Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), pgs. 30-56; see especially pg. 55. I have followed Barnes in dating On Baptism as I have. Tertullian himself is worth the time and the study. To that end, see Barnes' study, as well as the damn fine and winsome book by Eric Osborn, Tertullian, the First Theologian of the West (New York: Cambridge UP, 1997). For help with Tertullian's rhetoric, see Robert Sider's Ancient Rhetoric and the Art of Tertullian (New York: Oxford UP, 1971).
** See John E. Rotelle, ed. 1991. Sermons 57-94 on the New Testament. The Works of Saint Augustine: A New Translation for the 21st Century, Pt. 3, vol. 3, Edmund Hill, trans. (Brooklyn, NY: New City Press).
*** Hill notes that he has, in the italicized phrase, expanded Augustine's Latin which says, tersely, 'on wood.' Hill says, further, that he has done so because he is sure this is an allusion to contemptibile lignum, a found in the Vulgate of Wis 10.4. As he points out, the text of Wisdom here alludes to Noah's Ark. Moreover, 'Christian commentators saw the contemptibile lignum . . . as a figure for the cross' (174).
So, one may ask, how has this text yielded a trite, brittle fabrication of lazy preachers and their benumbed congregations? I must confess, I have no answer to that question, but I have taken a look at some of the classic interpretations of the text, which have the boat figuring the Church and the storm the persecutions and insults the Church must bear on her pilgrimage, and I have looked in some detail at the passage itself. I will, thus, proceed in that order.
It is convenient to start with Tertullian's treatise On Baptism, composed sometime around 198 AD*. I will then glance at Augustine's all-too-brief sermon on this text, to show that, while he seems to subjectivize the text, he really doesn't. Then, in part 2 I'll turn to the pericope itself, to see just what's going on as Jesus sleeps through one hell of a perfect storm on the Sea of Galilee. Then, finally, I will return to the older interpretations, to see what I can make of 'em in light of my admittedly amateurish attempt at exegesis. To that end, without any more ado, let's hie us to Tertullian.
Tertullian seeks in chapter 12 of On Baptism to refute those who dispute the necessity of baptism to salvation. It seems these opponents asserted that the apostles, with the exception of Paul, were not baptized, and thus the necessity for the rest of us is thrown out of bounds. Tertullian's arguments, interesting though they are, don't concern me here. I only note that his identification of our Markan ship as a figure for the Church comes almost as an afterthought. He notes that some have made the absurd suggestion that the apostles found themselves, as it were, baptized by accident as 'they were sprinkled and covered with the waves.' Nonsense, he says, because it's one thing to be drenched by a storm at sea, and quite another to be baptized in accordance with Christ's institution and following his command. Tertullian does, however, concede that the 'little ship did present a figure of the Church,' for, he writes, 'she is disquieted "in the sea," that is, by persecutions and temptations.' He goes on like so: 'the lord, through patience, sleeping as it were, until, roused in their last extremities by the prayers of the saints, He checks the world, and restores tranquility to His own' (Roberts, 675). So much Tertullian as a locus classicus for the Boat as floating Church.
Tertullian, no matter what one thinks of his assertion, still recalls that our story has little to do with the common, everyday troubles 'the flesh is heir to.' My beloved Augustine continues in this vein, although it seems at first as though he is only concerned with the most subjective and emotive response to the story. You see, Augustine maintains the theme of pilgrimage through the world we find laconically figured in Tertullian. Before I get to that, on with Augustine himself. What does he have to say?**
His sermon on this passage is freakishly brief, and no manuscripts of it exist anywhere that we know of (Rotelle 174, n. 1). It seems to have been delivered some time between, say, 415 and 425 - that's precision, you know. Well, to get to the point, Augustine tells his congregation that 'even the sleep of Christ is a sign and sacred symbol [sacramentum]' (173), because Paul himself has said that Christ may dwell in each of them through faith (with reference to Eph 3.17). He goes on to say that the 'people sailing in the boat are souls crossing the present age on a paltry piece of wood (Wis 10.4)' (173)***. We reach the heart of Augustine's homily when he exhorts his people to 'wake Christ up,' because 'Christ is asleep in you.' Here is the text in full:
'You have heard an insult - it's a high wind; you've gotten angry - it's a wave. So, as the wind blows and the waves break, the boat is in peril, your heart is in peril, your heart is tossed about. When you hear the insult, you are eager to avenge it; you do avenge it, and by giving way to someone else's evil, you suffer shipwreck. And why is that? Because Christ is asleep in you. What does it mean, that Christ is asleep in you? That you have forgotten Christ. So wake Christ up, remember Christ; let Christ stay awake in you, think about him.'
What's more, the 'memory of him is his word; the memory of him is his command' (173).
To tease this out a bit requires that I ramble through a bit more than just Augustine's smalle sermone. You see, to remember Christ is not simply a matter of thinking on him in some free-floating way, but to call to mind his word, especially through the meditation of Scripture. Recall that for Augustine, Scripture is ‘for now the face of God,' and we are to ‘melt before it' as we would before God himself face to face. To read Scripture, especially the words and commands of Christ, is therefore the way we obey the command to ‘seek his face always,' as Augustine himself says in the opening of his classic De Trinitate. That whole work, in fact, can be seen in one perspective as a long and, by Augustine's own admission in book fifteen, an ultimately failed attempt to recollect the person and work of the Trinity as manifest in Christ himself.
So, through constant meditation on the Scriptures, one recalls to memory Christ himself, his person and his work, and thus ‘wakes Christ up' in one's heart. In this way one will, say, respond to insult and persecution with kindness and prayer for the evil-doer's well-being, in accord with Christ's command and with his own actions. One will, in this way, be more Christ-like as one exercises one's memory in such meditation and action. Given the key role memory plays in Augustine's understanding of will and affection and suchlike, this proves a key to the playing out of operative grace in the life of the believer through time. That's a complicated matter that needn't detain me here. I only point all this out to show that Augustine's sermon on our passage, while short and seemingly moralistic, grows out of a dense web of reflection, recollection, and polemic on the nature of the will, memory, and desire, freedom and grace, and the Trinity in his economy. In short, while Augustine deals not so much with the boat as the Church, but with the particular sailors as particular souls moving through this world, he doesn't really subjectivize the text so much as place each particular soul in a complex set of relations without which it would have no substance at all. As with so much in Augustine, therefore, this sermon is far from being as simple as it seems.
So much my two examples of classic exegesis, at least in the West. Basil will appear later, and Tertullian will return for an encore, but for now, I want to pause and reflect for a second on this notion of the boat as Church, and the storm as the persecutions and shocks the Church is heir to in this fallen life.
Since Tertullian's mention of the boat as Church is offhand, and even a concession at that point in his argument, it has the feel of something of a tradition even that early stage in the history of interpretation. Given that Mark's gospel itself didn't attract much attention, this ‘Church as Boat' allegory probably comes from the reception history of Matthew and Luke, but it is applied to Mark as well. Moreover, Augustine's treatment is subtly different. Both reveal a strong tendency to see Jesus as, of course, divine, although there is no attempt in either case to tease out the evidence in the passage itself for Jesus' identification with YHWH [although, see below, when we all too briefly call Tertullian back from obscurity once again; to give a hint]. No, Jesus is assumed to be divine, and as such the proper subject of such actions as bringing tranquilitas to the world so that the Church might have a respite from persecution. What's more, that Jesus could with his word still a violent storm on the sea is not open to question - the allegory worked from the story itself reflects an extrapolation of that insight. Now, I've been, so far, reasonably positive in my assessment of all this, but I have to say that something has been bothering me all along. Not so much the interpretations themselves in their motivations and results - indeed, given the assumptions of the interpreters, I can't have much of a problem with ‘em. They confess that Jesus is the Son of God made Man, and that he got into a boat with the disciples, and calmed a deadly storm, and that power and mercy give them the warrant to spin an allegorical extrapolation to the life of the Church in toto, or the particular souls within the Church who must make their way through the world. No no no, I don't question these men as to their motives, and the allegories don't bother me, at least in principle.
That, dear reader, is the rub, don't you know. Regardless of their motives, regardless of the warrants for their allegorical whimsy, I can see even at this early stage in the Church's history of interpretation a subtle, hidden danger. They have, you see, taken their gaze from Jesus himself - at least in the examples offered here, we find that Jesus himself, in his person and work, is not the primary subject or object of reflection. The Church has become, if you will, the center of action, and, largely because they could take for granted who Jesus is and what he does, Jesus becomes kind of instrumental to the life of the Church. In this allegorical reading, I can see how it takes just a nudge - or, perhaps, a violent shove - and, voila, you get the bland reading so beloved by contemporary preachers and their congregations.
How so, you ask? Well, consider - if Jesus is instrumental to the Church in some way, as providing some kind of peaceful passage through a stormy world, say, then if you find yourself in an age that has forgotten, on purpose, just who Jesus is and what he does, then it's not too difficult to imagine forgetting the ecclesiocentric reading offered by our reverend fathers. That is, you can even eliminate the particularity of the Church herself, and make Jesus the instrument of your desire for a trouble-free, comfy existence. He then becomes the solution to your many and varied problems as you navigate [nautical!] this complex contemporary society. Thus, Jesus your fuzzy friend will help you out of any jam, calm your nerves, and steady your hand so that you can get on with life without too much trouble and with some assurance of success. Jesus will, don't you know, still your storms.
That Jesus, in Mark, has promised that those who have renounced, say, family, home, friends, and the like for his sake, will receive a hundred-fold in recompense by way of their membership in the Church, along with persecutions, is here completely forgotten. In fact, the desire to steer clear of persecutions itself becomes problematic. Still, it's not wrong, as Scripture attests over and over again, to hope and pray that persecutions might relent for the sake of our brothers and sisters who suffer so. All the same, we are promised persecution in one form or another. [Who knows if blissful indifference to Jesus and his gospel, and the co-opting of that gospel for the gratification of the Market and the State, might not be a subtle form of persecution we endure with our supposed ‘freedom of religion.']. In any case, while the likes of Tertullian and Augustine are not at all responsible for our own post-Enlightenment stupidity, we need to be wary of using their interpretations without further ado, because even our various churches are busy about the task of forgetting who Jesus really is and what he really does. In such a place and time, allegory can't trump typology, and we must all the more strenuously fight what David Farrow calls the ‘methodological principle' of ‘taking our eyes off Jesus.'
To that end, in part 2 I'll look at the passage in some detail, with attention ever and always focused on Jesus. To anticipate, I wish for us all to ‘fear a great fear' when we consider who Jesus is. To that end, the question of the disciples will be ours as well: ‘Who 'Who then is this, seeing that even the wind and the sea obey him?'
* You can find, dear reader, On Baptism in Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, eds. 1986. Latin Christianity: Its Founder, Tertullian. The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 3 (rpt. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans)., pgs 669-679. Detailed arguments for a chronology of Tertullian's writings can be found in Timothy Barnes, Tertullian: A Historical and Literary Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), pgs. 30-56; see especially pg. 55. I have followed Barnes in dating On Baptism as I have. Tertullian himself is worth the time and the study. To that end, see Barnes' study, as well as the damn fine and winsome book by Eric Osborn, Tertullian, the First Theologian of the West (New York: Cambridge UP, 1997). For help with Tertullian's rhetoric, see Robert Sider's Ancient Rhetoric and the Art of Tertullian (New York: Oxford UP, 1971).
** See John E. Rotelle, ed. 1991. Sermons 57-94 on the New Testament. The Works of Saint Augustine: A New Translation for the 21st Century, Pt. 3, vol. 3, Edmund Hill, trans. (Brooklyn, NY: New City Press).
*** Hill notes that he has, in the italicized phrase, expanded Augustine's Latin which says, tersely, 'on wood.' Hill says, further, that he has done so because he is sure this is an allusion to contemptibile lignum, a found in the Vulgate of Wis 10.4. As he points out, the text of Wisdom here alludes to Noah's Ark. Moreover, 'Christian commentators saw the contemptibile lignum . . . as a figure for the cross' (174).