Quotes from Ched Myers

Mark's Gospel originally was written to help imperial subjects learn the hard truth about their world and themselves. He does not pretend to represent the word of God dispassionately or impartially, as if that word were innocuously universal in its appeal to rich and poor alike.

Political readings can no longer skirt the implications of the cornerstone of New Testament faith—Jesus crucified as the justice of God.

The first "young man" symbolizes "saving life and losing it," the second "losing life to save it." At this stage in the story, however, without knowing the end, the episode of the young man represents a mystery. All we know is that everything has gone sour.

The discipleship community, as has happened so often throughout history, has buckled under the boot of security forces, its dreams of a new order shattered by the brute reality of state power. Jesus, now alone, goes to stand in a kangaroo court with no hope of justice. There his final conflict with the powers will be played out.

It is very much the contention of this commentary that Mark remains a manifesto for radical discipleship. Unfortunately, our movement has not been very successful in finding new reading strategies commensurate with the deepening politicization of our practice. Too much of our biblical study remains strictly devotionalistic and often frankly superficial.

What is unbelief but the despair, dictated by the dominant powers, that nothing can really change?

To pray is to learn to believe in in a transformation of self and world, which seems, empirically, impossible.

Is not prayer the intensely personal struggle within each disciple, and among us collectively, to resist the despair and distractions that cause us to practice unbelief, to abandon or avoid the way of Jesus?

What is the meaning of Resurrection? ...is it not the exorcism of crippling unbelief, which renders us dead in life (Mark 9:22) rather than alive in our dying (8:35)?

the fact remains that those on the peripheries will have "eyes to see" many things that those of us at the center do not. This, however, does not relieve us of the responsibility to read the Gospel and respond to it. Indeed, to listen to the perspective of the periphery (both that of Mark and those of today) is fundamental to our awakening to the call to discipleship in the locus imperium.

If we are going to talk about how undocumented immigrants impact our society, we ought to first address how our national policies have disrupted their lives. Above all, solidarity with the immigrant poor should seek to know them not as statistics, but as human beings who endure extraordinary hardship and trauma in their struggle just to survive—especially since the structural causes of their impoverishment lie on our side of the border.

In sum, then, my socio-literary approach to Mark's healing and exorcism stories takes into account both the social and cultural dimension. It attends to the discursive function of the episode in the narrative strategy of the author: as symbolic action addressing a symbolic system that oppresses. This opens up and maintains access to the text for all. It also explains why Mark's Jesus is such a threat to the stewards of the status quo.

Throughout the Gospel there is a consistent narrative opposition between those representing the symbolic order on the one hand and the poor and marginal on the other: 1. priests (purity) vs. the leprous (1: 41ff.); 2. scribes (debt) vs. the physically disabled (2: 1ff.); 3. Pharisees (debt) vs. the dependent elderly (7: 6ff.); 4. scribes (debt) vs. disenfranchised widows (12: 40).

And, as in ancient Israel, modern purity codes function politically as well as socially. The very same myths of "chosenness" that shape patriotic ideologies in the U.S.A. also shape the dreams of neo-Nazi white supremacists and the social codes of Afrikaaner apartheid. And what about the socio-symbolic apparatus of our national security state, with its "priesthood" of the security-cleared and its "holy places" surrounded by barbed wire?

Philosophers seek to understand the world; the point, however, is to change it.

A literary approach pays attention to both what Mark tells us and how he tells it.

Why does he choose to invent a literary form rather than use a culturally familiar one? This will be discussed at the outset under "ideology of genre" (below, 3, B).

interpretation is a conversation between text and reader, requiring not detachment but involvement. This conversation is often called the "hermeneutic circle." Our life situation will necessarily determine the questions we bring to the text, and hence strongly influence what it says and means to us. At the same time, the text maintains its own integrity, and we owe it to ourselves and the text to try to enter into its world as much as possible.

White North American Christians, especially those of us from the privileged strata of society, must come to terms with the fact that our reading site for the Gospel of Mark is empire, locus imperium.

Jesus' attack upon the temple thus appropriately concludes with a new "site" for prayer now that the "house of prayer" has been abandoned.

The community's practice of forgiveness becomes the replacement of the redemptive/ symbolic system of debt represented in the temple. The community becomes truly the "priesthood of all believers," the place of prayer "for all peoples.

Mark considered these money changers suitable symbols of the oppressive financial institutions he so fiercely opposed. "Those selling doves" refers to the staple temple commodity relied upon by the poor.

His is a story by, about, and for those committed to God's work of justice, compassion, and liberation in the world. To modern theologians, like the Pharisees, Mark offers no "signs from heaven" (Mark 8: 11f.). To scholars who, like the chief priests, refuse to ideologically commit themselves, he offers no answer (Mk 11: 30–33). But to those willing to raise the wrath of the empire, Mark offers a way of discipleship (8: 34ff.).

Mark's story of Jesus stands virtually alone among the literary achievements of antiquity for one reason: it is a narrative for and about the common people. The Gospel reflects the daily realities of disease, poverty, and disenfranchisement that characterized the social existence of first-century Palestine's "other 95%.