Whatever yearning that John the Baptist’s presence and words had stirred up inside Herod Antipas was being denied oxygen before it really had a chance to breathe, through Herod’s own evil order. His false integrity of being true to a misguided oath severed his hope for real integrity in the possibility of developing an inner spiritual anchor through further conversations with John.
Christian theologians today, like Kathryn Tanner, are asking Christians to look again at how the societies and economies we live in now form us and even ask us to understand Jesus’s teaching on their terms, rather than the other way around. Which means that you and I, if we’re to be faithful to Jesus, must struggle to ground our deepest identity in his way, his truth, his life. Even as we acknowledge that we are social creatures, dependent on the people and culture and society in which we live. Even as we acknowledge that Jesus’s own healing, redeeming work took place within all the relationships and norms and customs that formed him. Some of which he cherished. Some of which he challenged.
In today’s Gospel, we meet two people who hope for something more. One woman hopes that just by reaching out and touching Jesus she will be healed. One man, with a daughter close to death, hopes Jesus can just get to her in time. Two very different people, one very same hope brings them through the crowd.
I want a faith and a language about faith that delivers me more fully to the world I’m alive in and matters to the life I’m actually living in that world. Don’t you? If I hear a phrase like “Jesus saves,” which I very much believe, I don’t want it to register like a number on the Richter scale. I want to be thinking about being saved from forces that might stop a pendulum clock, cause walls to creak, or throw objects upward into the air. I don’t want to hear about the saving power of Jesus in ways that don’t relate to the ways I know I need to be saved. Wouldn’t you agree?
Mark seems to be telling us that there is not a point that can be extracted from the stories. The point, or the power of Jesus’s message is only experienced from within the stories. Maybe because, as Flannery O’Connor put it, “A story really isn’t any good unless it successfully resists paraphrase.” The gospel, according to Mark, can’t be paraphrased. It must be entered. Trusted. Experienced. That’s how all true stories work.