Socio-Rhetorical Examples
Definition of divine history.
While God does not make a vocal reply either to Jesus' request that God remove the ordeal of suffering and death (14:36) or to Jesus' cry that God has forsaken him (15:34), things occur that the reader naturally attributes to the power of God at work in the world. When three hour periods of time during the day of the crucifixion include darkness over the whole land from the sixth hour until the ninth hour (15:33), the narration seems to imply that God is the central power and emotion of the universe responding to the death of Jesus. But what kind of response is it? The response seems to imitate the gloom and despair--the dark hour, if you will--in Jesus as he moves through suffering and rejection to death. The response does not include phenomena that hold a promise of restoring Jesus' life, like the earthquake in Matthew 27:51-53 that opens the tombs and raises the bodies of many saints who had died. Rather, the cosmos appears to move into death vicariously with Jesus. In other words, the cosmos loses its light--which is the source of life for plants, animals, and humans--at the same time that life is ebbing away from the body of Jesus. When life-giving breath actually goes out of Jesus' body, the curtain of the temple is torn in two from top to bottom (Mark 15:38). In Matthew 27:51, the splitting of the curtain occurs in the context of the earthquake that splits the rocks and opens the tombs. But not so in Mark, where the splitting of the temple curtain is the single cosmic phenomenon that occurs when Jesus dies (15:38). Surely the passive form of the verb, "the curtain was split," is a "divine" passive--to be understood as "was split in two from top to bottom by God." In other words, God's action is to be perceived in events that are otherwise unexplained. But both the cause of the event and its meaning are unexplained in Mark. The text leaves the reader with the task of filling in the blanks, so to speak.
As the account continues, the next unexplained event is that the large stone is rolled back when the women come to the tomb after the sabbath. Again the verb is passive with no designation of who rolled it back. The implication again seems to be that God's powers at work in the universe rolled it back. Then the young man at the tomb interprets Jesus' absence as "He has risen" (16:6). In accord with Markan narration, this is not a divine passive, "He has been raised (by God)." Somehow there has been a transformation of Jesus' corpse into a body that could "rise up" out of the tomb. But this transformation, once again, must be the work of God. In implicit ways in Mark 15:1-16:8, then, God is perceived to be at work. God does not speak in the narrative. But God is perceived as acting, both by what God does and does not do. God does not remove suffering and death from Jesus. Jesus becomes completely alienated from people, and the powers of God in the universe allow him to die. But God responds by giving Jesus' body the power to rise up from death to life. The final implication, then, is that both the death and the resurrection of Jesus are God's will and God's work.
If God is at work in the death and resurrection of Jesus, what kind of divine history is this? Is this part of an overarching process of salvation history that is gradually working toward divine goals. The answer is no. There is not a clear plan of salvation history in Mark. In other words, it is not evident how history might gradually progress over centuries and millenia toward goals the divine has for humans and the world. Rather, events occur during a special eschatological time. Jesus' life, death, and resurrection set the stage for the coming of the Son of man (13:24-26) some time in the near future. Indeed, the kingdom of God will come with power "before some standing here taste death" (9:1). The death and resurrection of Jesus, therefore, take place in eschatological time. The one explicit hint in Mark 15:1-16:8 that Joseph of Arimathea is looking for the kingdom of God (15:43). Otherwise the eschatological nature of time during the account is implicit. When the chief priests and scribes taunt Jesus as Messiah king of Israel (15:32), the implication is that God's rule has established itself through Jesus as its human agent. But this is part of the mockery by the chief priests and scribes, not a clear characterization of Jesus in the story. In fact, the title Messiah king of Israel seems not to be quite right. As a suffering, dying, and rising son of god, Jesus is significantly different from common perceptions of what the Messiah king of Israel would do.
What kind of eschatological history, then, is this? Why does Jesus have to suffer and die? As we move on to other aspects of the sacred texture of the text, we may find an answer to this question. In this section, however, we observe that Mark presents this history as part of the will of God. Earlier in the story, Jesus tells his disciples, "It is necessary that the Son of man suffer,... be killed, and after three days rise again" (8:31). The implication is that this will happen simply because God wills it to happen. Jesus also said, "The Son of man goes as it is written of him" (14:21). It is not clear to what scriptural text this might refer, since no text available to us in Hebrew Scripture or the Apocrypha refers to the suffering and death of the Son of man. So far as the Gospel of Mark is concerned, however, "past testimony," which is perceived to be divine information from an earlier time, asserts that the Son of man must suffer and die. From the perspective of Mark, then, this span of history is foreordained to happen in the manner in which it does, and it will come to an end when the Son of man returns on the clouds with the angels in the glory of his father (8:38; 13:26).
From V. K. Robbins, Exploring the Texture of Texts, (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1996), p. 124-5.
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