Hearing Mark: not so different from us

I had a brilliant professor who once said that we have to know what a 'savior' is saving people from. She had converted from Christianity to Judaism because she couldn't answer that question from her own experience: nothing to be saved from, no need for a savior.

I say this to highlight the importance of the human connection between ourselves and those ancient folks who first heard this story. Without that connection, this is only an intellectual journey. If we do not allow ourselves to feel their world, we will be isolated from the real Good News contained in the Gospel.

We can share in the emotions of those folks so long ago if we will only open our minds to their world. So, here is a start on that journey.

The earliest audiences lived in what we can best think of as a third world condition. in the ancient world, there were the massively rich and the very poor. The middle class didn't really exist (although you can push this too far). Families lived from paycheck to paycheck, but it was more common to have too little for everyone to eat than otherwise. Women regularly died in childbirth and men regularly died as a result of their 'jobs.' For most families, everyone worked, even children, and they didn't usually have careers in any sense, they either farmed land for someone richer than themselves or they hired themselves out as laborers.

It is hard to tell if those first audiences were urban or semi-rural; they do seem to be familiar with both city and country life, but this may have been somewhat normal. I believe that most families which were not attached to a particular land-owner probably lived a migrant-worker type life, moving the entire family to find whatever work was available.

While Mark was at least familiar with - and may have been native - to the Judean context, the listeners seem to have been Romans first and foremost. Mark explains Aramaic words and uses Roman ones without explanation.

Looking to other parts of the story, we can guess who might have been in the audience by looking at who were the heroes. The power brokers are almost always outside the Kingdom promised by Jesus. The 12, while followers, are also a little clueless. the real heroes are usually women, the outcast, and Gentiles. These are the people at the bottom of the social hierarchy, those regularly beaten - even killed - without reason or cause.

We will have to try to pry ourselves out of our comfortable and generally secure worlds to grasp the power of the promise of the coming Kingdom, to genuinely hear - even remotely - what they might have heard.

We will have a tendency to see this story through 2,000 years of stained glass, but we must look more closely if we are to be true to the story.