At the end of my second last blog, I described the Holy Spirit as the shared project of God and human beings to bring victory out of defeat by importing the ultimate perfection of the universe into the present time, by living tomorrow’s life today. This is of course linked to Jesus’ ministry of God’s kingdom, by means of which God’s future erupts into the present time. Indeed Jesus’ whole ministry is inspired by the Spirit which had descended on him in baptism. But long before Jesus, the Holy Spirit is mentioned in the creation story of Genesis, and in many of the oracles of the prophets.

The question arises: is the experience of the Holy Spirit the same before and after the earthly life of Jesus? It would seem impious to suggest otherwise, but then if the action and suffering of Jesus have added nothing to what Isaiah knew, that looks like a lot of bother for nothing. I had already characterised the Spirit as the persuasive action of God on the universe, on molecules and minds, but if Jesus is seen as the conclusive act of divine persuasion, surely something is thereby added to the Holy Spirit? The Nicene Creed may take account of this with its description of the Spirit “proceeding from the Father and the Son.” Well that’s the Latin version of the Creed. The Greek version does not have “and the Son” insisting that the Spirit takes life only from the Father. Somehow we want to honour the integrity of human experience of the Spirit throughout history while recognising the crucial place of Jesus’ life and death and resurrection in the experience of God. Yes. I meant that. God was changed by the event of Jesus: the suffering of God with Jesus opens up in the Father even greater depths of compassion, and in the Spirit a greater urgency to adopt human beings as children of God, like Jesus. In his letter to Romans Paul wrote of the same Spirit that Isaiah knew, but it is a Spirit who has learned to tell the human spirit that it is a child of God. Yes, God learns. If God loves, how can he/she not learn?

Perhaps we can lean a little on the Pauline phrase, “the communion of the Holy Spirit.” In Greek this is koinonia, a word taken from the cultural and commercial life of the Greek cities. Enterprises with several partners were a koinonia. People who belonged to religious, philosophical or artistic clubs were a koinonia. Paul used it of the life that believers shared with each other and with God. The writer of the First Letter of John writes that the purpose of his letter is that the recipients may have koinonia with the senders who have koinonia with the Father and his son Jesus Christ. Something that faithful people might have looked for in the world to come, a common life with God, is said to be available now, to all. The life of the Holy Spirit is characterised in the last three petitions of the Lord’s Prayer: shared daily bread, shared forgiveness of debts, shared deliverance from evil.

This last petition is well placed to remind the one who shares a common life with God, that temptation towards evil is still possible, in fact very much possible for people who believe they are united with the Most High. The name of this basic temptation is arrogance – remember the garden of Eden? Human beings may imagine that they are such privileged creatures that the other creatures don’t really matter as much. But if the Spirit cooperates in the birth of every child, acts as the finger of God in every healing, and raises the murdered Jesus to new life, it must understand the process of every molecule, the life of every cell, and incorporate in its koinonia the planet and all its living things. It has been active in the creation of all forms of spirited dust from viruses to vaccines, from cabbages to kings. The communion of the Holy Spirit includes the ecosystem of the universe. All life and all the bases of life are holy.

This truth has been evident to some Eastern religions, especially Jainism and Buddhism for centuries, while Christians have been deceived by bad theology, bad humanism and bad science into thinking that homo sapiens is all that matters. The idiot Mr. Musk was quoted the other day defending expeditions to Mars because we’ll need to live there when we’ve made the earth uninhabitable. In all honesty I have to admit that the Bible and the Christian tradition, lacking any profound insight into non- human life , have been an obstacle rather than an encouragement to ecological awareness. A reformed trust in an all- inclusive Holy Spirit may lead to a wholesale reformation of Christian thinking.

The foregoing blogs are only an initial attempt at grasping the sort of story told by Mark’ Gospel. All the groundwork – the history, sociology, anthropology, economics, politics and culture of the society in which it was written are missing from my account, although some amounts of all of these have fed my understanding over the years of my study of this text.

Q. So, wouldn’t it be better to start with these basics rather than rushing into the kind of theological overview I have given. Surely that overview may need altered by the results of these other disciplines?

A. Yes, it may need alteration, but some grasp of the extraordinary story which Mark told, is necessary in advance of using these disciplines more thoroughly, if only to guide that use and make it fruitful. So, for example, my overview reveals that this text is not an eyewitness account of Jesus’ life and death, but rather a narrative meditation on the memory of Jesus held by the author and the community of faith to which he or she belonged.

I do not need therefore to use the resources of history to discover factual evidence for every event in the narrative. It is irrelevant whether or not Pilate had the custom of releasing a political prisoner at Passover time, since Mark is using a typical folktale motif – the choice of which prisoner to be released- to show the determination of the Jewish leaders that Jesus should be killed. If we found out from historical sources that Pilate did in fact have this custom, that would add to our knowledge of Pilate, but would not make it more certain that Mark’s story is factual, because any sensible person who reads it, knows that it is not primarily a factual report.

Yet historical study is necessary to show that it does contain some factual material: the fact of Jesus’ life and its location; the period of time and the social conditions in which he lived; the faith of the Jewish people and its institutions; the geography of Galilee and Jerusalem; the Roman Empire and its administration of Galilee and Judaea; the politics of the occupied territories; the language of Jesus as different from the language of the Gospel; the fact of slavery; the economics of these areas; their climate and ecology; the teaching, healings and death of Jesus; the existence of his disciples as a group. And much more. Enough to show that although the Gospel is not a factual report, neither is it a theological fantasy with a wholly imagined hero, based on an extreme form of Judaism.

Q. Another question is why I permitted myself the freedom of re-imagining Mark’s story. Surely that involves an illegitimate leap from the language of the first century into that of the twenty first? As if we could mean the same thing by the word “God” as Mark meant. And why adultérate Mark’s imagination by mine?

A. If the leap is impossible, there is no point in reading the Gospel as it would remain a mere time capsule, opaque to our understanding. And if imagination was necessary for Mark’s understanding of Jesus, it may also be true that mine is essential to my understanding of Mark, and may be useful to others, provided I do not try to conceal it. One of the debilitating assumptions of the worship of the Church of Scotland is that the mere reading of Scripture is meaningful to the congregation. Yes, a sermon follows which may assist such understanding, but often by that time the reading itself will have been forgotten. A good translation can assist the transfer of meaning from text to people, but often the clearer the translation the more opaque the text which is rooted in another time, place and culture. Attempts to overcome this problem by forms of scripture which are frankly paraphrase rather than translation are unsuccessful because they limit the scripture to the skill and honesty of one paraphraser. But a re-imagining of scripture based on the best practice of Christian scholars is a reasonable task for clergy in the reformed churches. Mark needs many others like me to make his/her imagination comprehensible to twenty first century readers.

Q. You don’t need to be a Marxist to see that theological ideas however imaginative belong to the ideological superstructure of a communal event of which the lives of particular persons in a particular society are the material basis. Given that God cannot be seen, the reality of what he/she does must somehow be evident in what people say and do and suffer. Yet my re-imagining of Mark takes very little account a) of the people who participated in the ministry of Jesus, especially the Galilean disciples, or b) the people from whom Mark learned the story of Jesus forty years after that ministry.

A. I agree with this objection: the people of Galilee, those who encountered him and those who followed him; the people of Jerusalem who participated in the events of the last period of his life before his murder; the Pharisees, Sadducees, priests and High Priest; the Roman officials and soldiers; all these need attention, as we cannot understand the story of the Gospel without them.

Then there are simple but vital pieces of historical information: what is a denarius? What was the average daily wage of a Galilean peasant? How was the fishing trade organised in Galilee? What was a “carpenter”? How does crucifixion kill you? Familiarisation with such matters is also necessary for interpretation.

I can only plead that I have studied all or most of these matters over the years, and do not feel I need to detail them in this series of blogs. Those who want this kind of information could usefully read The Historical Jesus, a Comprehensive Guide by Gerd Theissen, Fortress Press.

Q. Usually scholars interpret the tearing of the temple curtain in one of two ways: as signifying an end to the temple worship for those who trust in the crucified Jesus; or as signifying a new open access to the heart of God. I suggest that it signifies the rending of the partnership of God and Jesus, meaning it is one with his cry of abandonment. How can I be sure I’m right, given especially that Jesus was quoting a psalm which ends with trust in God?

A. Let’s remember that one of these events did not happen – the tearing of the curtain – and that the other may have, but who would have heard it? So this is how Mark imagined Jesus dying, and therefore the details are his. I think he means the cry to be one of abandonment. Luke supplied details which end with an expression of trust; Mark could have done so. The curtain is a more difficult matter. As it screened the Most Holy Place it can be interpreted as the interface between humanity and God, a symbol of the relationship of God and Jesus. But yes, the tearing of it can be seen as a symbol of revelation, of the un- concealment of God. Such a meaning seems to contradict the cry of Jesus, whereas my interpretation, that it symbolises the state of abandonment would be more appropriate. Perhaps it could be seen as the tearing apart of the flesh of Jesus to reveal his divine holiness? That might chime with the response of the Centurion,”Surely this man was a son of God!” I want to focus on the reality of the abandonment, which I see as central to Mark’s understanding of the murder of Jesus. I am aware that in all probability Mark had access to an account of Jesus’ time in Jerusalem concluding with his death, which may have been written or memorised and spoken. Some of the details he used may have been in that account, but the choice of detail remains his.

I wonder if my interpretation of the resurrection in Mark is totally honest. I say that I am following Mark, who gives no detail about the resurrection. That’s true, but I also should have stated that I start from the conviction that no “supernatural” events happen in this world. So corpses blasting their way out of tombs is not on my list of possible happenings. But even when I believed that the resurrection happened much as recounted, I nevertheless thought it disappointing that after trying to save the world through a human being, God intervened by force majeure to rescue Jesus and defeat the powers of evil. After all, presumably he could have just solved all the problems of the world by supernatural action, and saved Jesus the trouble. My interpretation doesn’t rule out divine action in the divine sphere, where God takes Jesus into Godself forever, while leaving his disciples to be persuaded of his resurrection by his life and death. The nature of that persuasion can be seen in Paul’s description of the appearance of the risen Jesus to him: “it pleased God to reveal his son in me.” For Paul this risen life fills all worlds, but is manifested in him and other believers. There is something in Paul’s experience of himself, which he calls, “messiah in me,” but equally he writes of “ growing into the full stature of Messiah, and of belonging with others to the “body of Messiah”, in which believers comprise the organs and limbs of the body. The risen Jesus is wonderfully greater than his followers but not separate from them. Their imagination of him still matters.

In using Mark’s gospel as an imaginative account of Jesus’ murder, I realised that his narrative of that murder is the key to the whole of his story of God’s persuasion of human beings in the life of Jesus; and although this story is only one of many in the New Testament, I want to look at it more comprehensively, to begin rewriting the story of God.

The first verse of Mark’s gospel is notoriously slapdash in its syntax:

“Beginning / origin/ foundation/ of the joyful message of Jesus messiah, as it is written in Isaiah the prophet…..

There is no punctuation in the Greek MSS so it’s not clear whether the opening sentence ends after Messiah or continues into the reference to Isaiah. It is clear however that Mark is emphasising the first word. He wants to remind the reader of that other beginning which is the first word in the Book of Genesis, which signals the mysterious start of God’s creation of the universe. He is saying that the ministry of Jesus is part of that creative movement of God, indeed, a decisive part.

A little later, in the baptism of Jesus, Mark tells us that at that moment, Jesus saw the heavens torn apart ( the Greek verb is schizo as in schizophrenia). The Genesis story tells that God made a vault to separate the realm of the universe from the realm of God. Mark is saying, in language borrowed from the Hebrew Bible that all separation of God from his creation is abolished in the mission of Jesus.

Mark shows us the dove of the Holy Spirit, the presence of God, settling on Jesus, while God’s voice recognises Jesus as his/ her dear son. Then “immediately” as Mark insists, the Holy Spirit drives(!) him out to be tested by Satan, the enemy of God and power of evil. This phase of creation involves battling the power of evil. How quickly and vividly Mark establishes the theology of his gospel!

God is the creator God who is still at work making a universe of which he/she can say, that it is good. In pursuit of this goal God recognises Jesus as the dear son and rips open the vault of heaven to send the Holy Spirit upon him.

Jesus who is called Messiah, ie anointed person, is God’s dear child, God’s human partner in the battle against evil. Jesus does not separate himself from other human beings but comes with sinners seeking a new start in baptism.

The Holy Spirit is the presence of God with the universe and its creatures. It’s dovelike shape is a reminder of its brooding presence over the waters of chaos in Genesis, a telling image of God’s persuasive love. It is the available God, present in every event, but especially present to Jesus, who is uniquely responsive to it.

Let’s not say that from the beginning of Mark’s gospel we have a doctrine of the Trinity, but rather that we have a vivid articulation of the dimensions of the God in whom we live and move and have our being.

At the risk of ridicule let me imagine God, as the One in whose womb the universe is being born. Jesus is the child God has made already before the programme started, as the model for all things. The Holy Spirit is the life God shares with her children, through the health of her own body. The pregnancy is menaced by disease, so the Holy Spirit actively persuades the universe towards life, and Jesus plays the role of good physician. When disease strikes the physician, clearly we have a crisis. The key to this clumsy metaphor is that just as a woman does not have access to her own womb, so God the mother/ father does not have direct access to creation, because God respects the creation’s own processes of growth.( freewill).

Mark goes on to depict Jesus as teacher and healer, who in both activities battles for life against death. Evil and death are linked powers in Mark’s view, infecting not only bodies but minds and doctrines. When he teaches that the Sabbath was made for human beings and not the reverse, he tackles the deadening power of religion on scriptural law. The same power can be seen today in the conservative insistence on what Leviticus says about homosexual acts. Jesus’ principle of interpretation is that all rules are intended for the benefit of human beings. For life and not for death. That is to say that scriptures must be interpreted in the light of the Holy Spirit, the life God shares with people. When the religious leaders estimate that Jesus’ healings are enabled by the power of evil, Jesus warns them that if they badmouth the spirit, because they do not value its gift of life, it may not be available to them to prompt their own escape from death. The same principle is announced when Mark shows him dealing with a man with a withered hand on the Sabbath. When conscious that he is being observed by religious leaders, he asks, Is it lawful to do good on the Sabbath or to do evil? To rescue life or to kill? Actual, ordinary life, the gift of the creator, is the touchstone of his teaching and healing. Of course we may say he is also concerned with the quality of life, but he is disturbingly unconcerned with what some would define as quality, when he forgives sins almost casually and provides physical health.

What are the evil spirits against whom he acts so decisively? Elsewhere I have analysed these as a combination of personal damage and social prejudice. Leprosy as such is physical damage but the society’s fear of the disease and rejection of the sufferer is social prejudice which makes the sufferer feel unworthy, to the extent that they find it hard to believe that anyone cares. As when the leper says to Jesus, If you want to….you can make me clean. Or there is the damage done to the demon-possessed man from Gerasa, by the Roman conquest, who gives his name as Legion. The brutality of Roman conquest is matched by the fear of his community, to leave him afflicted. Jesus has the courage to do battle for the man’s life, but in order to do so, he has to enter the conflicted realm where evil has power and may damage him. His willingness to put himself at risk is a measure of his trust in the efficacy of the Holy Spirit.

Evil is no-creation or un-creation, the embrace of chaos as a tool for gaining power over the forces of the universe and over the bodies and minds of living creatures. It is ultimately self-destructive, but it lives a parasitic existence on the back of those it seduces, terrorises and torments. Mark represents this evil principally in diseased people whom Jesus heals, and in the powerful religious leaders whom he opposes. The corrupt court of Herod who almost literally consumes his people, and the equally corrupt government of Pilate are other possessed bodies.

Evil is only manifest in human arrogance, wealth, malice, hard-heartedness, lies and cruelty, so Mark leaves it open whether it has an origin beyond humanity. The Satan, the enemy of God, may as easily be a product of human evil as its cause. Evil is happy to maintain the kind of secret hegemony it exercises in the Israel that Jesus challenges, but once challenged, once exposed by the demonstration of goodness, it reveals itself as a vicious killer.

But the crucial moment of revelation is the moment of Jesus’ dying, when he is separated from the presence of the father/ mother God, because the Holy Spirit is no longer active but suffering. What is happening here? Mark tells us with the sign of the temple curtain torn asunder ( Greek schizo, as in the baptism story) that here the heart of God is revealed as ready to suffer out of love for his/her human son, and for the universe through him. At the same moment evil is revealed as a busted flush because with all its force it cannot compel allegiance from a human being, even when the human being feels abandoned by God. In face of the sorrow of God and of God’s child, evil is shown up as brutal and impotent. The exposure of the human/divine partnership reveals limitless resources of love; the exposure of evil reveals it as bankrupt.

This is the point where the reasonable reader says, Come on, in spite of all your rhetoric, Jesus is dead, snuffed out, nailed down, kaput, yes? So we may give him a sort of spiritual superiority to the powers of evil, but not victory, if we want to keep,our feet on the ground. In the real world the result is Sanhedrin +Romans 1: Jesus+ God 0.

Even from a perspective of worldly realism, we may question this alleged result. Has it not often been the case that the example of the martyred leader has given courage to the apparently defeated forces of justice so that they rally, persist and finally win? The persuasive power of the martyr, which shares in the persuasive love of God, cannot be safely ignored by the worldly powers that killed him/her.

But from the perspective of God there is more to say. We left God suffering the death of Jesus, the Holy Spirit rendered inept by Jesus’ acquaintance with grief. And God the father/ mother, in whom we live and move and have our being also suffered the same event. But to suffer is to receive, and to receive is to take into oneself, and to be taken into the self of God is to find life if you want it or death if you don’t. In this suffering, therefore, in this grieving love, Jesus finds again the life he has always shared with God, and evil people find the death which is their true desire. And the life of Jesus, no longer circumscribed by earthly limits, is unlimited in its scope and joy: the son is with the father, the child is with the mother.

But this is not yet the resurrection, since it leaves the human beings whom Jesus loved out of the picture. They are left simply with what they saw or heard of Jesus: that he died painfully opposing the powers of evil, out of love for God and the world. If the veil has been torn away, what they can see is a dead body on a stake. The question is: Is that enough? Can they believe that this is nevertheless a victory, and not a skin -of -the -teeth victory but an overwhelming conquest of evil and death? The answer is, they can, as they decide to continue Jesus’ ministry. No jiggery-pokery with tombs, no visions beyond those often seen by mourning people, are given to them. Perhaps it took months, assisted by Jesus prophecy that he would meet them again in Galilee, the place of the “beginning” where the doing of God’s persuasion in the world has to start again and again.

Mark gives no stories of Jesus’ appearing; only the enigmatic empty tomb and the command to keep the rendezvous with him. What we know is, eventually they announced the resurrection. They were persuaded and believed they could persuade others. The stories of Jesus appearing to individuals and groups are skilled narrative versions of this fundamental faith: persuaded by Jesus’ life and death, they believed he was alive in God, victorious over evil. So of course his tomb is empty, of course his most faithful followers, women, experience him as alive, of course his presence is felt in the discussions they had about his mission and death, of course he offers forgiveness and re-employment to Peter and all his shaky disciples. Yet it’s important that all this comes from facing the terrible silence of God that Jesus faced in his dying. God must not give them sneaky evidence of the truth. Out of their disappointment, their rage at injustice and the doers of it, their continuing loyalty to Jesus’ as the true ruler, out of their guts, they must imagine it for themselves; then it is resurrection, in which God and human beings give strength to each other and can celebrate with each other as partners in victory.

That partnership in which human beings share God’s ability to create liberation out of a sorrowful defeat, gives them a present into which they dare to import the promise of God’s future; they can live tomorrow’s life today. This is called the gift or shared life of the Holy Spirit, who is constitutive of the Assembly of Christian believers.

Yes, this is my imagination of Mark’s imagination of Jesus, except I have missed out much of his rich picture. But I have tried to be faithful to his strange truth. In my next blog I will attempt a critique of what I have written.

The gospels name two groups of people as responsible for the murder of Jesus:

1. The religious leaders of the Jewish people

2. The Roman imperial administration under Pontius Pilates.

With regard to 1. It is reasonable to remember that probably by the time the gospels were written, the Jewish Temple had been destroyed by the Romans and the synagogue Jews and the Jesus Jews had separated in enmity. It seems likely that the picture given of the Pharisees, Sadducees, and their legal experts (scribes) by the gospel writers may have transferred the open enmity experienced in their own times back into the time of Jesus and explained it as a quarrel about the nature of the Torah, the Law of God, as well as Jesus’ claim to be an authoritative interpreter of it. Modern examinations of Pharisaic teaching and Jesus’ teaching cannot find the differences which would have justified such antagonism or the very negative depiction of the Pharisees given in Matthew Mark and Luke, far less the depiction of those called Judaeans in the gospel of John.

Of course religious antagonism is not always rational; and the challenge of Jesus to the authority of established teachers and leaders may have been the root of it. If Jesus insisted on his own unique authority as much as the gospels show him doing, then we may understand why any traditional religious community might oppose his apparent arrogance. Matthew depicts him as a teacher of radical wisdom, Mark as a revelation of God’s goodness, Luke as prophet of truth, John as the announcer of a divine love available only to those who believed in him, and all of them as the Messiah/ Son of God. It seems likely that someone remembered in those ways would arouse suspicion and enmity from established religious leaders, namely the chief priests, as well as the teachers of the holy law and supporters of local synagogues, namely the Pharisees.

My judgement remains however that because of subsequent open enmity between followers of Jesus and the Jewish synagogues, we cannot wholly trust that the content of gospel passages involving the Pharisees is free of distortion. This places question marks against accusing the Jewish religious establishment of the major rôle in the murder of Jesus.

To understand why he was murdered it may make sense to start with the fact that the Roman authority put him to death as a messianic pretender. The Romans had some experience, and were to have more, of Jewish religious leaders who engaged in jihad against their rule. They understood that the claim to fulfil messianic prophecies, and to be sent by God to announce his kingdom, could result in open revolt which would cost Roman lives as well as Jewish. They almost certainly had a network of informants who would report on any local religious movement that might cause trouble. Pontius Pilatus did not need Jewish leaders to tell him about Jesus; he had his own information.

The Roman suspicion of Messiahs would have been shared by the Chief Priests, who feared the terrible damage caused by revolts to the lives of their people and to the continuation of the Temple cult. Indeed the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE and the ultimate dispersal of the Jewish people in 135CE were caused by Messianic revolts. Given the overwhelming power of the Roman Empire, sensible leaders counselled an acceptance of its rule provided it did not encroach on their religious activity. The High Priests also would have had their informants, who may have characterised the Galilean rabbi as messianic and dangerous.

The above analysis suggests that whereas the gospel accounts of Jesus’ arrest, trial and execution may be generally accurate, the specific detail given by each may be more imaginative than historical. They give no sources for the information they convey. At the time of Jesus’ arrest, it is probable that none of the followers of Jesus were eyewitnesses of his trial ; and that few saw his crucifixion. They give, in any case, somewhat irreconcilable accounts, as they do of the resurrection. My conclusion is that although we must deal with the gospels as holy writ, we must interpret their witness to Jesus’ murder as theological rather than historical, as imaginative story rather than reportage. Of course there will have been a historical memory of what happened to Jesus, built from personal involvement and details sourced from soldiers, slaves and other participants. But we are not given this. Rather we have four different imaginative versions whose aim is to communicate the divine reality of the historical event. I propose to look at the Markan account which influenced all the others.

There are quotations from the Hebrew Bible in Mark’s version, -such as from Daniel chapter 7 re the Son of Man, and Psalm 110 re Jesus at God’s right hand – which by are important; but beyond these there are whole stories from that Bible which influence the whole of Mark’s story of Jesus’ murder:

1. Passover. This association is given by the narrative of the Passover meal. Originally the blood of a lamb smeared on Jewish houses meant that God’s spirit who killed the first-born of the Egyptians passed over the Jewish families. Certainly some believers saw Jesus as the sacrificial lamb whose blood protected them from the wrath of God. It’s possible that Mark saw the murder of Jesus as terrible parody of the Passover, in which Jewish people murdered the eldest son of God. Beyond the specific connections however there is the fact that the murdered Jesus is seen as leading his people in a new exodus, into a new covenant.

2. Covenant. Jesus spoke of his blood as being of the new covenant. The Mosaic covenant was accompanied with the blood of oxen, while the people committed themselves to the laws of God while God promised to bless the people and lead them to a good land. The prophet Jeremiah spoke of a new covenant by which God would write his laws on his people’s hearts, and forgive their sins. The book of Hebrews which may have been written by the time of the gospels speaks of Jesus’ blood, given once and for all as a sacrifice to God, being effective in establishing a new and greater covenant with God.

3. The suffering servant. The songs of the suffering servant are found in Isaiah chapters 40-55, the so-called “second Isaiah.” They are meditations on an ideal servant of God, who incorporates elements of great leaders and prophets, along with the history of Israel itself. Chapter 52:13 – 53: 12, speaks vividly of “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief,” whose suffering brings others healing and peace with God. Details of this song, such as the silence of the servant, his being led like a lamb to the slaughterhouse, and his tomb being with the rich, are influential in all narratives of Jesus’ murder. The servant took upon himself the sins of others, although it is emphasised that he was not being punished by God, but brutalised by human violence. God, seeing his sacrifice, loads on to him the sins of others and forgives them. The influence of this profound chapter is evident throughout all the New Testament witness to Jesus.

4. Psalm 22. Individual lines are significant to Mark, like its opening cry of abandonment which Mark puts on the lips of Jesus, and those about the division of his garments. But it is the lonely desperation of verses 1-21 upon which he focuses. Like the psalmist, Jesus is in terrible pain and bodily indignity. Like the psalmist is is cruelly mocked. Like the psalmist he trusted in God, only to find himself in this extremity. Doubtless the Psalmist’s praise of his rescuing God was also noted by Mark, but he chose not to use it in his story. The fact that the cry of abandonment is Jesus final utterance in the gospel indicative of Mark’s strange and astonishing theology; how can this be good news?

5. The pattern of Jesus’ healing, set out in Mark’s gospel. Mark is rigorous in establishing this pattern: 1. Jesus encounters need. 2. Jesus enters into a place of danger/ taboo/ evil /death. 3. Jesus heals the needy person(s). This is a distinctive pattern, seen for example in the healing of Jairus’ daughter where Jesus literally enters a place of death, breaking the social taboos, and raises a child to life. “Time to get up,” he tells her. Mark intended his narrative of Jesus’ murder to reveal the same pattern, on a vaster scale. His death and resurrection say to humanity, “Time to get up.” Because this theme is Mark’s own we may reckon it as the one he intended to be most significant for the understanding of Jesus’ death.

I now want to resume my earlier imagination of Jesus as the one in whom God is human. He was able to discern in any event which he encountered, the persuasive presence of God, and by his own faithful response, to reveal that presence as good news for people. In God he consciously lived and moved and had his being. The pattern imagined by Mark mentioned above is shown by the gospel writer to be part of Jesus’ battle against evil, which is also God’s battle. God cannot perfect his world without human partnership because God has given human beings the power of free will. Jesus is the one who understands what Paul calls the weakness and foolishness of God. The German theologian murdered by the Nazis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, also understood: God is weak in this world, he said, so he gets pushed out of the world onto the cross.

In his healing ministry, Jesus constantly sides with the weakness of God, entering the places owned by the “strong man” Satan, boldly channelling God’s persuasive goodness, putting his own reputation and sometimes his own safety at risk for the sake of the suffering person. In these events Jesus is already and always the crucified Lord.

Mark’s narrative of the arrest, trial and murder of Jesus reveals the same pattern in the greatest detail. The whole event of the murder and the resurrection is imagined by the author as a new Passover in which Jesus is the willing victim who is slaughtered so that the power of death may pass by his people. His is the blood of a new covenant, a new intimacy between God and his people. He is the suffering servant acquainted with grief upon whom the evil of the world in unloaded. He is the one who trusted God and becomes a worm, not a person.

The narrative emphasises the willingness of Jesus, even against the desire of his own soul, to model the persuasion of God. The ease with which worldly powers can do their will is shown in the Sanhedrin, the Roman Governor , the crowd and the soldiers. They do the talking, they make decisions, they act, while Jesus is silent; subject to their decisions, he suffers. The scriptures witness to the fact that this kind of suffering is all too common in the lives of those whom have served God. It has always been very easy to refuse the persuasion of God, to kill the protester, torture the opponent, bomb the rebels, rape the wives of the foreigner, crucify the disturber of your peace. Jesus is silent as God is silent before the inexorable pressure of religious and political power. This takes courage, of which Mark wants us to know that Jesus is capable, while Peter is not. Staying with the persuasion of God is not a walk in the park. He above all retained his humanity while his torturers lost what little of it they possessed.

So can Jesus defeat the evil to which he is subjected, by maintaining his bond of love with God? If he can show that bond as unbreakable in the face of evil and death, then surely he will have won a victory. But Mark has respect for the power of evil; he refuses to show Jesus as a stoic hero untouched by his suffering. “My God,” he howls “why have you abandoned me?” The persuasive presence of the father is not any longer experienced by Jesus in his moment of most need. What is this? What use is a God who cannot even give emotional succour to his beloved son who is being murdered? Is not this a profound disgrace? Luke recognised this and gave Jesus more trusting words before he died. Mark gives the reader a hint: the curtain in the temple which separated the holy area from the holy of holies is torn apart at the moment of Jesus’ dying, just as the heaven was torn open at the moment of his baptism. God, the eternal one is torn open in the mission and suffering of his beloved son. God is not active at Jesus’ side because he is suffering with him; he also is weak and wounded. In this moment when their partnership is torn apart, when their lives are shredded, they are most completely united in their suffering. In case we haven’t picked up the clue, Mark adds the testimony of the centurion, that this man is a son of God, which reminds us of what God said to Jesus at his baptism, You are my dear Son; I am delighted with you. Jesus, God’s son refuses to be separate from the persuasive love of the father, while the father refuses to be separate from the agony of the son. Together they deprive evil of its power. Together they share a life undefeated by evil and death. This is the shared life, the communion of the Holy Spirit, the life of God’s future, in which “those who endure will be rescued”

Yes, this goes bit beyond Mark, but not much. I am imagining Mark imagining Jesus.

I had promised to deal with the murder and resurrection of Jesus, but before I do so I want to define more clearly what I mean by responding to God’s persuasion in the events of the world. To assist with this I have referred to the parable of the Judgement found in Matthew chapter 25:

“But when the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory.³² Before him all the nations will be gathered, and he will separate them one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. ³³ He will set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left. ³⁴ Then the King will tell those on his right hand, ‘Come, blessed of my Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; ³⁵ for I was hungry and you gave me food to eat. I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you took me in. ³⁶ I was naked and you clothed me. I was sick and you visited me. I was in prison and you came to me.’

³⁷ “Then the righteous will answer him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you a drink? ³⁸ When did we see you as a stranger and take you in, or naked and clothe you? ³⁹ When did we see you sick or in prison and come to you?’

⁴⁰ “The King will answer them, ‘Most certainly I tell you, because you did it to one of the least of these my brothers,^[c] you did it to me.’ ⁴¹ Then he will say also to those on the left hand, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire which is prepared for the devil and his angels; ⁴² for I was hungry, and you didn’t give me food to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave me no drink; ⁴³ I was a stranger, and you didn’t take me in; naked, and you didn’t clothe me; sick, and in prison, and you didn’t visit me.’

⁴⁴ “Then they will also answer, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and didn’t help you?’

⁴⁵ “Then he will answer them, saying, ‘Most certainly I tell you, because you didn’t do it to one of the least of these, you didn’t do it to me.’ ⁴⁶ These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

Some think Jesus is saying that God’s appointed King is present in the “1east important of his brothers” who must therefore be served by believers. There’s is truth in this, but it ignores one important detail: the righteous don’t know they are serving the king; they are just serving the least important! It may be that those who make a fetish of “serving Christ in the poor” are in danger of ignoring the subtlety of Jesus’ parable, and failing to engage with their unimportant brothers and sisters, since ordinary kindness is better than religiously motivated charity.

This example suggests how we should understand the doctrine that God is persuasively present in all worldly events. S/He is not to be understood as a divine addition to their worldly reality, but as a divine incarnation in them: they are, if we wish to notice it, the presence of God; the more they are themselves, the more they are God. The pair of starlings who have nested in my neighbour’s eves, bringing forth their chicks in spite of the efforts of the neighbourhood cats, speak to me of God, not because of some added spiritual dimension but because of their robust and glittering starling-ness, their care for their nestlings as well as their winged aggression against intruders. Gerard Manley Hopkins understood:

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame; 
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells 
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s 
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name; 
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: 
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; 
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, 
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

I say móre: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is —
Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

When God became incarnate in Jesus, s/he’d had some practice.

The gospel of Jesus tells me that I am a beloved child of the creator God. In the book of Genesis, the presence of the Creator in every aspect of the creation is noted when God sees that each created thing is “good.” The creator’s goodness is present in all creatures; each in its true identity is an instance of God. If I abandon my sins, I can find my true self, my divine identity, and become capable of discerning this identity in others. Jesus is not just an example of how I should act, but a model of what I should be. His story continually inspires me to feel the persuasion of God in every event of my life.

At the same time, the Spirit of the Creator who will perfect the creation, who will make sure that nothing except evil itself is lost and whose compassion will embrace all his imperfect children, this Spirit meets me from the future, enabling me even now to experience aspects of the perfection s/he has planned for me. But not for me as an isolated person, rather as open to the shared life of all creation, to the just polity of all creation, to the beloved community, of which the Christian Assembly is called to be a foretaste.

I can, if I wish, live in constant appreciation of the marvellous and varied beings of the world, as in Hopkins’ phrase, they “go themselves.“

Except I can’t. And that’s due to my evil and the evil of others. Now it’s time to write about the murder of Jesus.