Cutting the Eucharistic knot (Calvin's Institutes, Battles edition: p. 1416, vol. 2)

Presbyterians occasionally mock the doctrines of transubstantiation and consubstantiation because a physical presence of Christ in the sacrament of the Lord's Supper seems to them inherently ridiculous, if not offensive to reason. It's certainly offensive to my reason, but I have some sympathy with Lutherans and Romanists who struggle to understand how Christ can really and actually be present if he is not physically present. As the literature on the Lord's Supper over the millenia amply demonstrates, determining the precise relationship between the materials of the bread and cup and the physical body of Christ is where many Christians and theological traditions get stuck.

Alexander the Great, so they say, took a non-linear approach to loosing the Gordian Knot, which was impossible to untie: he cut it in half. In a passage explaining why the administration of the Lord's Supper must be accompanied by the preaching of the Word, John Calvin discusses an error which arose because this did not happen.

[T]hey did not observe that those promises by which consecration is accomplished are directed not to the elements themselves but to those who receive them. Certainly Christ does not say to the bread that it shall become his body, but he commands his disciples to eat and promises them participation in his body and blood. Paul's teaching takes the same form, that the promises are offered to believers along with the bread and the cup.

Attentive listening to, and exegesis of, the words of institution found in the Gospels and 1 Corinthians 11 will keep us from focusing on what happens to the elements of the Supper: instead, they direct our attention to its recipients. Since they receive the sacraments by faith, and faith is a gift of the Holy Spirit, we begin to see the Spirit is the agent who unites us to Christ.

Proper exegesis, Calvin suggests, offers the Romanist or Lutheran the freedom to step outside his or her dilemma and approach the sacramental knot in a non-linear and more fruitful manner.

Jupiter Ascending, Downton Abbey, & Leviticus

The reviews of Jupiter Ascending have not been kind, and I suppose I can see why. I am second to none in gape-jawed amazement at The Matrix, with which the Wachowskis exploded onto the film scene, not only revolutionizing the way action sequences ever after would be filmed, but creating one of the most potent allegories of Christ’s redemptive work in recent memory. Though vast in interstellar scope, Jupiter Ascending shares none of The Matrix’s metaphysical or genre-shaping ambitions. Instead, it puts me in mind most of The Fifth Element, and if that silly science-fiction romp is the standard, then Jupiter Ascending is good (and notably clean) fun.

Royalty is a major theme in Jupiter Ascending: it turns out that the earthling Jupiter, the titular character, by pure accident is a genetic duplicate of a now-deceased intergalactic matriarch and vicious capitalist empire-builder. As such, she is by nature “Entitled,” i.e., royal. There’s a rather lovely scene (although, admittedly, somewhat preposterous) in which bees engage in a bit of synchronized swarming in recognition of her majestic status. (It appears bees have something of a sense for this sort of thing.) While this scene has been widely mocked on the interwebs, I thought it hit on what most people, around the world today and throughout time, have intuitively accepted as true: there are some people who are, to borrow from George Orwell’s Animal Farm, more equal than others. Take, for example, the popularity of Downton Abbey: hordes and hordes of Americans, reared on the self-evident truth that all men are created equal, adore a story built on the odd conceit that some people are born to rule, and others to serve them. 

In God’s providence, I saw Jupiter Ascending the day before I preached Mark 1:40-45, in which Jesus heals the unclean leper. The leper’s problem was not so much that he was diseased, but that he was ceremonially unclean, and thus unable to worship in the Temple (Leviticus 13-14) and prone to being shunned by those who wished to worship in the Temple (Leviticus 5:3). Under the Old Covenant system of worship, cleanliness and uncleanliness were a symptom of man’s alienation from God: all you had to do was interact with a person with a skin disease, and your inherent sinfulness would, as it were, bubble to the surface and make you unfit to enter the presence of the LORD God to offer up a sacrifice in worship.

It seems to me that (what seems to be) the native human instinct for respecting persons of royal birth is, in some way, a reflection of the Old Testament laws of purity and cleanliness. There are some people who are more holy, more clean, closer to God than others, and such persons must be respected: even if their personal character is not respectable, their status demands our reverence and awe. 

In light of this, Mark 1:41 is shocking: “Moved with pity, [Jesus] stretched out his hand and touched him….” Leviticus 5:3, if not the rest of the Old Testament Law, is extraordinarily clear: to simply touch the unclean is to become unclean oneself. To push the double negative past the breaking point, Jesus not only is unafraid of becoming unclean, but bears a holiness so intrinsic and so powerful that he obliterates the category of uncleanness: he makes all things clean. He cannot be made unclean; instead, the power of sin is so conquered by his person that the unclean has no option but to become clean. “And immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean” (Mark 1:42). Herein lies the immensity of Christ’s work on the Cross: because in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, even the ways in which human societies have intuitively ordered themselves since time immemorial are shown to be mere shadows and types, overturned and abolished in the person and work of our Savior.

(Here, then, lies the peculiarly Christocentric genius of the American experiment in republican self-government: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” No royalist, enmeshed as she or he must be in the Old Covenant perspective on the world, could say such a thing.)

We respect royalty because we respect God: that is how we were made. Nonetheless, Christ’s work on the Cross destroys the royal conceit: there is no more clean or unclean, but in Christ all things have become new. “[T]hat is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.” (2 Corinthians 5:19)

An unclear ending

As the Revised Common Lectionary returns us to Mark 16 for Easter Sunday this year, I point you to previous posts on Mark's authorial choices and the broader question of Mark's Gospel within the New Testament canon.

Redemptive History and the Markan Scriptures

In my last post, I discussed why Mark's Gospel ends at 16:8 from the perspective of its human authorship. Now I want to turn to the same question from the perspective of its divine authorship. This is the question of the canon, or "Why did God give us the Scriptures he gave us?"

The work which has most profoundly shaped my thinking on the Biblical canon is Herman N. Ribberbos' Redemptive History and the New Testament Scriptures (Phillipsburg: P&R, 1963; 2nd rev. ed., 1988). What I consider his most important contribution to the study of the canon is the observation that the New Testament Scriptures were the apostolic doctrinal foundation on which the Church was to be built (ex. 1 Corinthians 3). Practically speaking, this means we have 1 and 2 Corinthians because those Pauline letters contained apostolic doctrine necessary to the building and maintenance of the Church, and we don't have Paul's other letters to Corinth because they were not necessary to that end.

In other words, when considering the canon of Scripture, we can rest in God's providence. He ensured we have the prophetic and apostolic doctrine we need: we just don't need whatever else the apostles and prophets wrote, no matter how interesting those works might have been.

So let us assume R.T. France (along with some others) is right when he suggests the original, longer ending to Mark's Gospel has been lost to us, just as have been Paul's other Corinthian letters. From the divine perspective of the God who not only superintended the writing, but also the preservation, collection, and canonization of the Scriptures, nothing has truly been lost. The Church has, in the version of Mark's Gospel which she has preserved, the Gospel she needs.

Whatever Mark's own intentions may have been, God himself intended this Gospel to end at 16:8 for the good of the Church.

The tail end of Mark's Gospel

Most English versions of the Bible, if they print it at all, put Mark 16:9-20 in brackets and indicate those verses' origin as fairly dubious. Going back a long, long time, we have plenty of evidence Mark's Gospel ended at 16:8, and equally plenty of evidence 16:9-20 was an addition constructed so the expected record of Christ's resurrection would be in place.

As one might anticipate, a (very minor) minority still argues Mark 16:9-20 is authentic, but the majority does not. However, that majority, at least today, falls into two camps: those who think Mark deliberately ended his Gospel with 16:8, and a smaller group which thinks Mark's original ending was lost quite early on, leaving no traces. In this post, I want to discuss a couple assumptions made by this latter group which, in my opinion, lead to an erroneous conclusion.

To be clear, I by no means think these people are crazy or incompetent: they include R.T. France, who tops my list of "Anglicans Who Are Super Good at Exegesis." France is an interesting example because, in the introduction to his commentary on Mark (in the New International Commentary on the Greek Testament series), he argues the Gospels were each drawn from a wide array of sources and were not necessarily themselves used as sources for the others' composition. This stands against the prevailing view that Mark was written first, then Matthew and Luke used Mark as one of their sources, and who knows what John was up to. If France is right on the Gospels' literary origins, and I think he is (or at least the school of thought which he represents), then it doesn't matter whether Mark was written before Matthew.

At the same time, France does lean toward Mark being the first of the written Gospels, and this leads him to think it extremely unlikely Mark would not include an unambiguous record of Christ's resurrection. In other words, if Mark is the first to get the story out, he wouldn't omit its most important part. But if Mark is not the first (and I lean toward Matthew being first, with a heavy dose of agnosticism on the priority question), he doesn't have to get all the details absolutely clear. He is free to leave things a bit murky, knowing the straight story is readily available elsewhere.

This raises a related point: it seems most, if not all, assume Mark is writing his Gospel in isolation; that is, his Gospel will be the only version of the Gospel his readers will encounter. But maybe he wasn't. Peter makes reference to Paul's letters (2 Peter 3:15-16). If Churches read the letters of several apostles, why, in principle, could they not read several Gospels? In that case, the Evangelists do not present competing views of Christ, but complementary ones. As Big Ideas go, God becoming man in order to redeem mankind from sin and death and recreate the heavens and the earth in the bargain is, well, about as big as they get. Most of the time, I tend to think only four perspectives is passing few.

It's entirely possible Mark's Gospel had a longer ending than that which we currently have; after all, one cannot prove a negative. If it did, however, it was not because Mark's was the first Gospel, or because he wrote it in isolation; these scenarios cannot be proven, and at least the latter strikes me as very unlikely. At this point, I am of the opinion Mark ended his Gospel at 16:8 because that was the best way to present his contribution to inspired Christology.

Immediately

In his Gospel, Mark uses the word "euthus" ("immediately") so often it seems less a stylistic choice than a verbal tic. It is even more frequent than it appears to be in English translations because the versions do not translate it uniformly: sometimes they use "immediately," sometimes "at once," sometimes "just then," and so forth.

What Mark means by "immediately" is not necessarily obvious. On some occasions, it no doubt means "at that very instant," which is what we might expect. But in Mark 1:28, it seems incredibly unlikely that the reports of Jesus, which after all were transmitted verbally, from one person to another, went throughout Galilee instantaneously.

It seems to me, then, that Alexander Bruce is on to something in the old Expositor's Greek Testament. In vol. 1, p. 345, he writes "euthus: almost = idou ["behold"], Matthew's word for introducing something important."