That is the content and especially the tone of the reading that is assigned to accompany the gospel of the “day in Capernaum.” Was Job right? Of course he was. The torturous suffering he describes courses through the world and always has. So the liturgy creates a sharp contrast on this Sunday between the Old Testament reading and the gospel, and apparently that contrast was deliberately aimed at.
Job spoke of how dark, empty, and hopeless human days are. Mark, in the gospel, describes a full and fulfilled day that is complete in itself and is full of health, holiness, and salvation. But that creates a still more profound interpretive context. Now we are speaking not only about the power of Jesus’ preaching, and not only about his power over demons and sickness. Beyond that, we are speaking of his power over the world’s chaos.
It is true that Mark’s composition, viewed in itself, is not lacking in chaos. That is present throughout the day. It erupts in the man who begins to shout in the middle of the synagogue worship because he is being shaken by his demons. It appears in the illness of Peter’s mother-in-law. It shows itself in the many sick people and those plagued by the demons of society, the people who are brought to Jesus in the evening.
The chaos of the world, the chaos of society, this whole disorder and confusion is thus already present even in Mark’s composition. But through the liturgical composition—that is, through the church’s official interpretation—this motif now stands out in full force. Now, for the first time, we grasp the real profundity of the Markan text. But now we also grasp the extent of the salvation that is happening here. The world is, in fact, alienated from itself and without hope. But with Jesus the state of things comes back to plumb, people sink into rest, chaos is transformed, the demons of society to which individuals are helplessly surrendered are banished. The evening and the morning are no longer full of disappointment but are overflowing with messianic salvation.
This salvation that fills the emptiness and eliminates chaos arises precisely from the fact that Jesus, with his Gospel, has set loose in the world a history that overturns everything, one to whose service people can surrender themselves. This is no longer arduous service like that spoken of in Job’s lament but a service in freedom. Peter’s mother-in-law is healed because she is touched by Jesus, the one who fulfills all history, and she immediately stands up and serves this new thing. It is a magnificent composition that Mark has created here; it reflects the whole of Jesus’ activity. But in the light of the liturgy this composition emerges with a still greater depth of acuity.
It is probably clear by now what I am about here: the bits of tradition available to Mark had already interpreted events in the life of Jesus. Mark then, most certainly, again interpreted Jesus and his actions with his composition of the “day at Capernaum.” The church’s liturgy then deepens this interpretive process still further: it places Jesus against the background of the Old Testament. Only then can we understand him fully.
So what about the correlation between “fact” and “interpretation”? Where are the pure facts in the composition of Mark 1:21-39, prior to the level of interpretation? And even if we could isolate the pure facts from the interpretations, would they be any kind of help to us at all? But above alclass="underline" where is the truth in Mark’s composition? Is it to be found beyond the level of interpretation? Perhaps the following scenario can help us to get a little further.
A Thought Experiment
What if we imagine for a moment that the gospels had never been written, and that instead the first day of Jesus’ public activity had been filmed by a hidden camera and everything said in connection with his appearance had been recorded by a concealed microphone. Image and sound were then combined into a film that is presented to us today, uncut and without commentary—with the claim that it offers us pure fact and is absolutely authentic. What would we know in that case?
Well, something: in this way we would perceive an immense number of details that are entirely absent from Mark’s account, or only fragmentarily there. We would know how Peter’s house looked, outside and inside. We would know how Sabbath worship was conducted in Capernaum. We would see sick people getting up again and shrieking possessed people suddenly becoming quiet. We would finally have original examples of the Aramaic spoken in Galilee in the first century. Above all, we would then have words of Jesus that we could be absolutely sure are authentic. But would we understand them? We would have no evangelists—that was the assumption behind our scenario—to interpret them for us. We would lack the whole context of interpretation that the New Testament and the communities of the early church place at our disposal.
And as regards the figure of Jesus himself: what would we see? We would see a man of the Near East, or more precisely a Near Eastern Jew, and we would learn that he is called Yeshua. He would—probably to our profound horror—look quite different from the way we had imagined him. He would be neither the sovereign Christ of the Byzantine apses nor the fettered man of sorrows of Gothic art nor the Apollonian hero of the Renaissance. His Aramaic language would be comprehensible to only a few specialists. A lot of his gestures and postures would seem strange to us. We would sense that he lived in a different civilization and a different culture.
And yet: everything we would see would be important, exciting, even disturbing. We would know, in the end, many details that biblical scholars have been working to discover for a very long time. But would we, with all that, know what actually happened back then? Would we know more than what the gospels already tell us? Would we now really know with certainty that Jesus drove out demons “by the finger of God” and that his healings were signs of the reign of God now coming to pass (Luke 11:20)? Would we know, because now we could see the external events, that here, in this person, the Logos of God had become present entirely and forever? Let me emphasize: we would know nothing of what really matters about Jesus, his mission, his task, the mystery of his person.
To really experience anything of that we would have to be able to see the whole public activity of Jesus, be able to survey everything he did, not only on the first day. Above all, we would have to be aware of the claim that underlay his preaching and healing. We would have to be informed about the reactions of his audience, especially those he made his mortal enemies. Here already, then, the filmed documentation of only the first day of Jesus’ public activity would fall short. We would need a documentation of the whole period of his public work.
Fine; let’s make that part of our scenario. We document on film everything that happened from the time Jesus left his parents’ house until he was laid in his tomb—not only what happened to Jesus himself, but also among his friends and foes. That would mean that a lot of films would have to be running on a lot of screens alongside one another—and for about a year and a half. It would be an enormous burden of work just to watch it! We would not be able to hold out.