It seems to me that the fact that Jesus had a deep relationship with physical attitudes, the language of the body, and the world of signs is of great significance, because precisely in this it becomes clear that he lived in an unbroken relationship to human physicality. Jesus is not alien, helpless, or disturbed in his relation to the body; for him, body and bodiliness are indispensable aspects of humanity.
Jesus takes the body and its needs seriously. No one could have said of him what antiquity said of the pagan philosopher Plotinus and what Athanasius reported of the Christian hermit Antony: Plotinus “lived like someone who was ashamed to have been born into a human body,”3 and Antony “blushed” when he ate in the presence of others.4
The story of Plotinus reveals the absolutizing of the spiritual that was possible in the world of Greek culture, and in reading the description of Antony’s life we need to be aware that anti-bodily tendencies from late antiquity had penetrated Christianity so that the language of its legends distorted the reality of the saints’ lives. But supposing that Antony really did regard eating as something slightly indecent: what would he have thought if he had seen Jesus at a banquet with toll collectors and sinners that most certainly was not as silent and respectable as depicted in the paintings of the Last Supper in Christian art? And what kind of confusion would have overcome him if he had been involved in what Luke relates in chapter 7 of his gospel?
One of the Pharisees asked Jesus to eat with him, and he went into the Pharisee’s house and took his place at the table. And a woman in the city, who was a sinner, having learned that he was eating in the Pharisee’s house, brought an alabaster jar of ointment. She stood behind him at his feet, weeping, and began to bathe his feet with her tears and to dry them with her hair. Then she continued kissing his feet and anointing them with the ointment. (Luke 7:36-38)
Jesus is not upset in this story. He defends the woman against the criticism that begins immediately to be hurled at her. He interprets her action as a sign of her faith. The uninhibited behavior of the woman and that of Jesus are a match. Jesus understands. He knows what the woman’s signs mean. He has no fear of physical behavior.
The incarnational nature of Jesus’ work is obvious in his deeds of healing but also in all his signs and gestures: God’s salvation must enter into the world and penetrate every facet of its reality. It is not just a matter of changing minds. It is just as much about matter. Nothing can be left out. Redemption is meant for the whole of creation. The history of revelation has not been a progressive dissolution of the worldly but a more and more comprehensive incarnation, a deeper and deeper saturation of the world with the Spirit of God.5 God has “moved in on us” to do us good.
A Demonstrative Healing
Surprisingly often Jesus’ behavior concentrates into a formal symbolic act. The meaning of that will be clearer from the following example. I will begin with an incident that is related in Mark 3:1-6:
Again he entered the synagogue, and a man was there who had a withered hand. They watched him to see whether he would cure him on the sabbath, so that they might accuse him. And he said to the man who had the withered hand, “Come forward.” Then he said to them, “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to kill?” But they were silent. He looked around at them with anger; he was grieved at their hardness of heart and said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was restored. The Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him.
No question: it is not only a person’s illness that is being healed here. This is more: the healing becomes a demonstration, provoked by Jesus’ opponents who are watching his every move, even lurking about in the hope that they can put the law on him. That very attitude forces Jesus to react quite clearly. He calls the crippled man forward. This healing is meant to be a provocation. It is to show that the Torah is to be interpreted in light of what God really wants: in this case, to save life or give back life that has been lost or diminished, whatever the circumstances.
The healing becomes a symbolic act that says something fundamental about Jesus’ attitude toward the Torah. What really should happen privately and quietly, namely, the healing of a person, becomes in the face of the hardening of his opponents a public, provocative sign that extends far beyond the pure act of healing.
New Family
Mark 3:20-35 brings us a step further. We could title this part of the text “The Founding of a New Family.”6 The three-part story first presents us with the kind of enmity Jesus encounters when he begins to gather Israel for the reign of God. The resistance comes from two quarters: Jesus’ own relatives, who simply call him “crazy” (3:21), and the Jerusalem authorities, who have sent scribes to Galilee to observe Jesus. They, in turn, demonize Jesus by saying he is possessed by an evil spirit and does his miracles with the aid of the supreme evil spirit (3:22). Jesus warns the scribes with a saying about sin against the Holy Spirit, but he dismisses his relatives, who have come to put him under house arrest, with the curt question, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” (3:33).
But the narrative intends more than simply to illustrate the resistance to Jesus. It only gets to its real point when Jesus constitutes a “new family,” the family of those who do the will of God: “And looking at those who sat around him, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother’” (3:34-35).
In Israel, “doing the will of God” in and of itself meant following the Torah. But that cannot be what is intended in this situation, because Jesus’ family and relatives certainly kept the Torah. The common formula has acquired a new meaning. Here “doing the will of God” can only mean learning from Jesus what the living will of God is for “today,” the today that has broken upon Israel with Jesus’ appearing, and then responding obediently to this “today.” Whoever does that becomes Jesus’ brother, sister, and mother, and so belongs to Jesus’ new family.
As important as it is to rightly understand what “the will of God” has to mean in this passage, it is equally important to take the form of the saying seriously. Jesus is formulating his words here not merely in high rhetorical style, but even in juridical terms.7 Looking at the people seated around him, he speaks a declaratory formula analogous to one that was used at marriages in Israel (and also in divorces):8 “This is my mother, and these are my brothers!” The whole scene—like the healing of the man with the withered hand—is a kind of demonstration or illustration. We could also say that it is a definitive statement of intent. And yet such terminology is not adequate to what is happening here. Jesus wants to do more than merely declare or illustrate, just as the symbolic actions of the Old Testament prophets were more than illustrations or demonstrative declarations of intent. There is something creative in a symbolic action; it establishes a new reality. In our case it even has a formal-juridical dimension: Jesus releases himself from his physical relations and establishes a “new family.”
So what is related in Mark 3:20-35 is not a mere incident, and what he says about those who now follow the will of God is not simply rhetoric. Anyone who knows what clan and family mean in the Middle East can only see in Jesus’ distancing himself from his own family an event that cuts deeply into social relationships, something that is anything but innocuous.
The Installation of the Twelve
Finally, the installation of the Twelve in Mark 3:13-19 has a juridical-institutional dimension. I have already mentioned these texts in chapter 4, but only in regard to the fact that it is one of the clearest pieces of evidence for the “gathering of Israel” Jesus intended. Here my concern is with the institutional dimension of the event.