Who Jesus Gives

My New Testament professor at Virginia Seminary taught that each of the four gospels has a key verse. In his opinion, we’ve heard the key verse of Mark’s Gospel: “For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” Jesus gave everything for us, even his existence. One of my favorite books about Mark’s Gospel is The Existential Jesus by an Australian sociologist named John Carroll. As his occupation suggests, he’s not a seminary trained biblical scholar. And I wouldn’t recommend it as a first reference or commentary on Mark: Some of his interpretations are rather speculative. But he gets the intensity and the humanity of Mark’s Jesus.

But first, what do I or Carroll mean by “existential?” Jean Paul-Sartre summed up Existentialism in this one sentence: “Existence precedes essence.” Before we talk about the essence, the essential nature of various things, we need to ask how they even exist. To put this in more everyday language. How often has someone asked you, or have you asked, “What do you do?” How often has someone asked you, or have you asked, “Who are you?” How often have you even asked yourself, “Who am I?” But which is really more important to ask: Who or what? So, in everyday language: Who precedes what.

What I think Carroll gets right about Mark’s Jesus is the anxiety and intensity of a life lived on the border between existence and nothingness: “Jesus is the archetypal stranger…While others see him charged with brilliant and terrifying charisma, he himself struggles along his life-path. He is the existential hero — solitary, uprooted from family and home…He has no occupation, nor worldly power. He chooses followers, tries to teach them, but they remain foolishly obtuse. Everything he attempts founders. Increasingly feared and misunderstood by those closest to him, increasingly hated by the authorities, he withdraws into troubled introspection…By the end of the story, he has lost confidence in any God up above. He himself is all there is — he alone.”

Does that seem too strong?  On the one hand, this fully human being identifies himself before the High Priest by the divine name of God given to Moses — I AM. And yet, the later gospel of Matthew only quotes what Mark first reported the only begotten Son of God saying from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” One cannot read Jesus’s mind completely any more than we can read our own sometimes. But any defense of Jesus’s divine nature that explains away any part of his human nature is no defense of Jesus the Christ, the Word who was with God and was God, but who also received our existential human nature fully into himself. To be human is to know that our existence is totally dependent on someone else. And to exist as human is to trust our creator, our heavenly parent even beyond this physical life, which we all fear might be non-existence.

And if Jesus could confess his sense of abandonment by God his Father, then so can any other human being, like Job. The book of Job consists of a long dialogue between Job and his friends about why he has suddenly been afflicted with every possible disaster, short of death. It becomes a fierce debate as Job questions the silent God he holds responsible for his suffering, and his friends defend God just as fiercely. but as C.S. Lewis noted, their defense of God is really false flattery masking a resentment rooted in fear. Job’s friends aren’t really trying comfort Job so much as they’re trying to comfort themselves. “You see my calamity,” Job says, “and take fright.”

And so it goes, chapter after chapter, until finally the LORD God does answer Job: “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations.” Afterward, a humbled Job can only answer: “I knew you only by hearsay but now, my own eyes have seen you. I melt away, and exhale in soil and ashes.” God doesn’t directly answer any of Job’s questions about human suffering. Instead, God asks Job to trust in God’s purpose for him, a purpose that will be fulfilled whether Job lives or dies. And in that trust, Job is able to exhale. But God then turns his anger toward Job’s friends, those flatterers of God, and says, “I burn with anger against you and your two friends, for not having spoken correctly about me as my servant Job has” (42:7-8). It seems that God prefers Job’s hard questions to the fearful flattery of his friends.

In your struggles with God, know that God prefers your honesty to your flattery. And in your search for meaning, know this, as the LEVAS hymn says, “What a friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear…Precious Savior, still our refuge, take it to the Lord in prayer…Can we find a friend so faithful who will all our sorrows share…Jesus knows our ev’ry weakness, Take it to the Lord in prayer.”

The Rev. David Kendrick

October 20th, 2024

22nd Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 24B