When Did we See You Naked?. Группа авторов
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Название: When Did we See You Naked?
Автор: Группа авторов
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Религия: прочее
isbn: 9780334060321
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Jesus’ face and head are the target of his bodily maltreatment. The ancient understanding of the human body adds further depth to the treatment that Jesus receives. Personal identity was linked to corporeality. The human body was more than a physical organ: it was a site of social identity and personhood. The body also linked the person to the wider cosmic and astral world, as borne out, for example, by Plato’s micro and macro cosmology. For Plato (427–328 BCE), the human and celestial bodies that compose the cosmos were linked.18 One influenced the other. Aristotle (384–322 BCE) had a similar regard for the human body as a social and cosmic map that mirrored the universe.19 From their limited anthropological perspectives Plato and Aristotle affirmed the symbolic and metaphoric nature of the human body in its relationship to society and the cosmos. If anything of this Greek philosophical tradition lies behind Mark’s story, then what happens to Jesus in his body has deep symbolic significance.
We know from an earlier story in Mark’s passion narrative (Mark 14.3–9) that when the unnamed woman anoints Jesus she anoints his head. Gospel auditors would see this act as reaffirmation of Jesus’ regal and prophetic status. The abusive treatment of Jesus’ head and face in Mark 14.65 brings together the two aspects of Jesus’ head and the prophecy made from the narrative’s anointing story. This act has implications for the members of the wider social world symbolized by Jesus’ head and, more specifically, Mark’s householders who identify with him. What happens to Jesus, their prophetic head, will also happen to them, if it is not already happening. Mark’s vignette shines a spotlight on the Gospel’s audience for what is happening, and will possibly happen, from Rome’s authorities. This is echoed in the second politically related interrogation before Rome’s representative, Pilate.
Pilate’s questioning of Jesus begins with the primary charge of treason or sedition: ‘Are you King of the Judeans?’20 This accusation about Jesus’ kingship continues throughout the interrogation. Mark portrays Pilate as indifferent to the charge brought against Jesus by the religious authorities. To placate the crowd growing in its hostility, he scourges Jesus and then hands him over to be crucified (Mark 15.15). The violent actions perpetrated by Pilate’s soldiers against Jesus add to Pilate’s initiating vicious deed. They perform a mock coronation ritual that ironically underscores Jesus’ regal status. The narrative’s chiastic structure makes the soldiers’ feigned attestation of royalty central (Figure 1).
The corporeal implications of the scene are unmistakable. Jesus is violated, maltreated, tortured, shamed and humiliated. The more demonstrable violence of this scene contrasts with the earlier humiliation from the religious authorities. The sexual innuendos of the scene are heightened. He is naked – this is the implication of B1 (Mark 15.20b) – covered only in a purple cloak. Even this is eventually ‘stripped’ from him. The violence in the way that the cloak is removed further underscores the intended mockery and humiliation of Jesus. The scene is one of sexual abuse. The act of humiliating Jesus’ physical being has sexual implications. Sexual humiliation will become more explicit in Mark’s scene of Jesus’ death.
The soldiers lead Jesus away to Golgotha for execution. Mark simply notes ‘they crucified him’ (Mark 15.24a), leaving all the pain and anguish suffered by the crucified victim to the imagination and memory of Mark’s audience. They would be well familiar with Rome’s crucifixion method. It is the next part of Mark’s statement that reminds Gospel auditors of the presumed nakedness of Jesus in this most humiliating moment and central story of the whole Gospel. The soldiers ‘divided his garments among them, casting lots for them, to decide what each should take’ (Mark 15.24b–c).
Mark presumes Jesus’ nakedness, as do the Gospel auditors. It is a high point of Mark’s story and a low point of humiliation and sexual shaming of the evangelist’s central figure. In this context Jesus dies alone, misunderstood and experiencing a sense of divine abandonment, though retaining his faith in his God whom, despite everything, he names ‘My God’ (Mark 15.34). The centurion’s final words sum up the scene. They question the veracity of the one declared as God’s Son: ‘In truth, was this man God’s Son?’ (Mark 15.39). Even at the moment of death, Jesus’ identity remains obscured and undeclared.21 His humiliation continues.
Much could be written about the evangelist’s purpose in presenting such a Christological portrait – of a sexually abused, solitary and misunderstood figure, crying out to his God to comfort him. Perhaps it can be briefly stated, as mentioned earlier, that this speaks into the realia of Mark’s audience: their own experience of abuse, maltreatment, rejection, loneliness and isolation in a Roman urban context of the 70s CE. The apparent silence of God in a time when some might have experienced violent sexual abuse warranted such a portrait.
Luke’s Gospel
Living a generation after Mark and working initially with Mark’s narrative, the evangelist of Luke’s Gospel offers an altered Christological portrait. The purpose, similar to that of Mark, was to speak into the new realia of Luke’s Greco-Roman context experienced by a culturally diverse household of Jesus followers, located in a different time and place.22 Luke adds Jesus’ birth story to Mark’s beginning, redacts central narrative stories of Jesus’ healing activity, and develops on his teaching, especially in a ‘Sermon on the Plain’ (Luke 6.20–49). Luke also expands the centre of Mark’s Gospel with ten chapters of teaching (Luke 9.51—19.27) as Jesus and his disciples journey towards Jerusalem, to his passion and death. Martin Kähler’s statement that the Gospels are ‘passion narratives with a lengthy introduction’ is as pertinent to Luke as much as to Mark.23
Luke’s ‘lengthy introduction’ presents Jesus as the revealer of God’s reign in word and deed. He heals, speaks and teaches in a more exalted manner than in Mark’s Gospel. Luke presents an elevated or heightened Christology. Rather than Jesus’ first words that recognize the closeness of God’s reign and invite disciples to ‘repent’, as in Mark 1.5, Luke has a 12-year-old Jesus in the Temple instructing its very teachers (Luke 2.46). In response to his parents’ dilemma as they search for him, Jesus speaks for the first time in Luke’s Gospel: ‘Did you not know that I must be in the things of my Father?’ (Luke 2.49b, author’s translation).
How interpreters understand the ‘things’ of my Father varies, from ‘the house’ (NRSV) to ‘the affairs’ (NKJV) to ‘matters’.24 Whatever ‘the things’ might mean, Luke portrays the young Jesus with a deep abiding relationship СКАЧАТЬ