The Woman Who Bled

One thing I find striking about the miracles recorded in the Gospel accounts is how much variety we find in them. Some instances are dramatic: Jesus commands the storm on the sea to be still; he tells the cripple to arise and walk; he calls out to Lazarus, four days dead in the tomb, to come forth. In others, he doesn’t seem to do anything at all, as in the case of the Centurion’s servant or the Canaanite woman’s daughter: he just tells the person requesting help that their loved one has been healed. In yet other cases, Jesus tells someone to do something completely mundane and seemingly irrelevant, and in the course of doing it the miracle just seems to happen, as in the Wedding at Cana, or the various miracles involving St. Peter and fish.

Then there’s the story of the Woman Who Bled, which might be the most peculiar one of all.

The story occurs as a kind of interruption in the middle of a completely different miracle. A man named Jairus, one of the administrators of the local synagogue, comes to Jesus with an urgent request. His daughter is dying and he pleads with Jesus to come lay his hands on her and heal her. (Mark 5:21-23). Luke’s telling of the story adds the details that the girl is only twelve years old and is Jairus’ only daughter. (Luke 8:40-42) Matthew’s version does not name the father and says that the girl has already died, but I think Matthew is anticipating things here. (Matthew 9:18).

Jesus arrives too late; the girl has already died and the Professional Mourners have already arrived, weeping and wailing fit to wake the… well … the dead. When Jesus says that the girl is not dead but merely sleeping, the mourners laugh at him, perhaps mistakenly believing him to be quoting a Monty Python skit.

Jesus elbows his way into the house to the child’s bedside, just him, the girl’s family and a couple of his closest disciples. He takes the girl’s hand and says, “Little girl, arise,” (Mark gives it to us in Aramaic: “Talitha koum.” ) And the girl gets up and begins to walk around.

That, briefly, is the story of Jairus’ daughter (Mark 5:35-43); but as I mentioned, there’s another miracle inserted in the middle of the story; one that sometimes gets omitted in the telling, but which appears in each of the three versions from the Gospels. It seems irrelevant to the story of Jairus, except maybe to build some suspense, and one could look at it as a minor miracle compared to Jesus’ demonstration of power over Death. Yet to me this other, digressive story carries a sense of mystery, possibly even greater than the other.

So, backing up a bit. A crowd had gathered around Jesus when Jairus got to him -- heck, just his disciples alone were already a crowd – and the crowd grew into a veritable parade as they followed Jesus to Jairus’ house. In that crowd was a woman who was suffering from a terrible condition causing excessive bleeding.

When I was a kid, I assumed this must be something like hemophilia, because back then people really didn’t talk openly about menstruation; at least not to pre-adolescent boys. The text doesn’t give us much specific information, but we can guess that it was The Menstrual Period From Hell, except that it had lasted for twelve years. Mark tells us, “She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better, she grew worse.” (Mark 5:26)

(Some commentators have noted that this woman had been suffering for twelve years, and that Jairus’ daughter was twelve years old. A coincidence? Or was the number chosen symbolically to link the two stories together? I couldn’t say.)

I suspect that a lot of guys don’t really understand menstruation. As I said, it’s not something that’s really talked about openly. It’s mysterious to us, maybe a little bit freaky, and it makes women crabby once a month. Yeah, guys tend to only understand the aspects of it that directly affect us. But I understand from the people I know who do experience it, that a menstrual period is at best, agonizing, and at worst can be incapacitating. In Jesus’ day, it was even worse for women because of the Jewish Laws regarding blood.

A goodly chunk of the Law of Moses deals with cleanliness issues. Certain things were considered Unclean and contact with them would render a person contaminated and they would be required to undergo ritual purification These things included pork, dead bodies, “discharges” of various kinds, and semen, but a biggie was blood. Several verses in the Book of Leviticus are devoted to avoiding contact with blood and purification should you, by necessity become contaminated by it. When I first tried slogging through reading Leviticus, I thought all these cleanliness regulations were rather excessive, until years later when I had to sit through OSHA training seminars on Blood-Borne Pathogens.

So was Moses trying to establish principles of hygiene and sanitation couched in religious terms for a culture that didn’t understand the germ theory of disease? Or were these rules simply based on the idea that there was something sacred or mystical about blood? Or was it a little of both? I couldn’t say.

This principle that contact with blood rendered one ritually unclean necessitated special rules for those subject to menstruation:

“’When a woman has her regular flow of blood, the impurity of her monthly period will last seven days, and anyone who touches her will be unclean till evening. “’Anything she lies on during her period will be unclean, and anything she sits on will be unclean. Whoever touches her bed must wash his clothes and bathe with water, and he will be unclean till evening. Whoever touches anything she sits on must wash his clothes and bathe with water, and he will be unclean till evening. Whether it is the bed or anything she was sitting on, when anyone touches it, he will be unclean till evening.’” (Leviticus 15:19-23 NIV)

A large section of the Mishnah, one of the foundations of the Jewish Talmud, is devoted to elaborating on the Levitical laws regarding menstruation, considering various contingencies, and even case studies of rulings made by rabbis based on the evidence of stained article of clothing.

Things were even more complicated for a person like the woman in Mark chapter 5, whose period lasts longer than usual. In such a case, the woman was required to remain quarantined for seven days past the last day of menstruation, and also to bring two doves or young pigeons to be offered as a sacrifice in addition to the standard ritual washing; something not required after a normal period.

So what with the unending bleeding, (no doubt accompanied by cramps that felt like her uterus was trying to eat her from the inside); the isolation from the rest of the community; the worthless doctors who didn’t know squat about women’s health but nevertheless charged her up the hoo-hah; not to mention the expense of having to buy two young pigeons each time it looked like the bleeding had finally ceased… well, this woman was pretty desperate. But she’d heard about this teacher who could heal people…

She makes her way through the crowd around Jesus and comes up behind him. If she can just touch his cloak, she thinks – the hem of his garment, Luke’s telling of the story says in the King James Version – she’s certain she’ll be healed. And so she does.

Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering. (Mark 5:29)

When I was little, I wondered how she would know; but if her uterus had been tying itself in knots, and then suddenly the pain ceased, that’s something she certainly would notice.

Jesus notices too:

At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who touched my clothes?” (v.30)

Let’s stop here and take a look at this. I usually think of Jesus’ miracles as him doing something: rebuking the winds, and they obey him, commanding demons and driving them out; laying on his hands, and curing the illness; even just saying that something will be so and it is so. Like a Fifth Level Wizard saying “I cast Magic Missile.”

But in this case, the miracle just sort of happens, without his active participation at all.

There’s an old doctrine in Christian theology which states that Christ was both True God and True Man, but even Christians who hold this doctrine don’t really think about it a whole lot, nor dwell on what this might mean. It means possessing both limitless Divine Power, yet also human limitations. How can this be? I have trouble wrapping my mind around it. This is truly hot ice and wond’rous strange snow.

And yet perhaps it’s what we’re seeing here, where Jesus seems unaware of the miracle he’s just performed; or rather, that the miracle performed itself without his conscious participation, as if he were merely the conduit of Divine Power and not its wielder.

The only active party in this miracle is the woman herself, who takes the initiative to grasp his garment and draws the healing power into herself. It’s a mystery.

As far as the Disciples are concerned, though, the only mystery is what Jesus means. After all, he’s in the middle of a crowd of people, all jostling and bumping into each other, trying to get close to him; and he asks who touched him?

No doubt Jairus was annoyed by the interruption too. His daughter was dying, and Jesus stops to ask such a stupid question?

But no, the question was an important one. Jesus wants to see and to talk to the person he had healed. 

he woman is scared. Was she going to get in trouble? After all, she was considered “unclean” and wasn’t supposed to go around touching other people. Would Jesus be mad at her for stealing a miracle from him? The woman falls at his feet and admits what she has done.

Jesus isn’t mad at her at all. He commends her for her faith: “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.” (v.34)

We don’t hear what happened to the woman after this. Jesus has this brief moment with her to reassure her and affirm her healing; then he gets yanked back to the other crisis at Jairus’ house. We don’t even learn the woman’s name. Then again, the text doesn’t say if Jesus had to take a bath to purify himself afterwards either. Healing the two women who needed help was a higher priority for him.

But although I called this an atypical miracle for Jesus, in one way it’s not unusual at all. Jesus often showed the most warmth and affection for those who took the initiative: the guys who opened a hole in the roof of the house Jesus was staying in so they could bring their crippled friend in for Jesus to heal; the Canaanite woman who, when challenged by Jesus on her right to ask for help, refused to be intimidated and gave a ready answer; the leper who, finding that he and his nine comrades had been healed of their disease while going to see the priest as Jesus commanded, took the time to return to Jesus and thank him.

And then this woman, denied contact with the rest of the community, who just wanted to touch him.

Clothes Encounter

If, like me, you are a child of the ‘70s, you might recall an athletic form of exhibitionism from that era called Streaking.  It was one of that decade’s contributions to Western Civilization, like Disco, Pet Rocks, “Whip Inflation Now!” Buttons and the Bicentennial Minute; and it involved young male college students dashing across a public space while buck naked.  I’m not exactly sure what the point of this was, unless maybe to encourage young female college students to do the same

One might not expect the Bible to have anything to say about this type of behavior, but there is a venerable tradition among Bible pedagogues like myself of trying to make Holy Writ seem hip and relevant by seizing on some popular trend and purporting to find mention of it Scriptures.  This doesn’t always work, but sometimes it’s interesting.  At least to other pedagogues.

Now, granted Streaking has not been trendy since the Ford administration; but being out-of-date has never stopped me before.  With that in mind, let’s take a look at the story of the Bible’s Streaker.

The story comes in the account of the Passion Narrative found in the Gospel of St. Mark.  It tells how Jesus was arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane by group of thugs, “a crowd armed with swords and clubs”, sent by the chief priests and guided by Judas, who identified Jesus to them.  The disciples  who were with Jesus ran off in fear.  The guards escorted Jesus to the high priest, and it is on the way there that Mark inserts this peculiar little incident:

A young man, wearing nothing but a linen garment, was following Jesus.  When they seized him, he fled naked, leaving his garment behind.  (Mark 14:51-52 NIV)

Evidently, this young man was a follower of Jesus, but not one of the Twelve Disciples.  Perhaps he heard about the arrest while he was taking a bath and threw something one to run and see.  Or perhaps he had just heard that Jesus would be in the Garden and only wanted to see him, but arrived as Jesus was being taken away.  He showed more courage than most of the other disciples, following the armed escort; but when the guards spotted him and tried to lay hold of him, he too ran away.

Who was this impetuous young man?  The text doesn’t really give us much about him.  It’s been suggested he might have come from an affluent family because he wore linen, instead of the more common wool outer garment.  That’s not really much to go on.  But Tradition offers an interesting supposition:  that the young man was Mark himself.

John Mark, traditionally considered the author of the Second Gospel, was a young man mentioned on a few occasions in the Book of Acts.  His mother, who was named Mary, but probably unrelated to any of the other Marys of the New Testament, had a house in Jerusalem which served as a meeting place for believers in the early Church, (Acts 12:12).

John Mark accompanied Paul and Barnabas on their First Missionary Journey, but he bailed out about the time they got to Pamphylia.  Perhaps he was homesick.  Possibly he just felt like he was in over his head.  Maybe he just wasn’t working out. The text gives no details; it just says he left Paul and returned to Jerusalem.  (Acts 13:13)  When Paul was organizing a second journey to visit the communities he’d started in Asia Minor, Barnabas asked Paul to give the kid a second chance.  Paul refused and the disagreement broke up their partnership.

Barnabas wanted to take John, also called Mark, with them. But Paul did not think it wise to take him, because he had deserted them in Pamphylia, and had not continued with them in the work.  They had such a sharp disagreement that they parted company. Barnabas took Mark and sailed for Cyprus, but Paul chose Silas and left, commended by the brothers to the grace of the Lord.   (Acts 15:37-40)

Eventually, though, Paul got over his bad impression of Mark, and mentions him favorably in a couple of his letters.

The Early Church Father Papias, writing around 140 AD, quotes an earlier source saying that Mark became a close associate of Peter,  Scholars believe that Peter had an assistant, because his first Epistle is better written than his second, and it is believed that he had someone with a better grasp of Greek polish up his writing.  That someone might have been Mark.

Papias’s source goes on to say that Mark compiled Paul’s teachings and stories about Jesus into the Gospel which was ascribed to him.  That would certainly explain where Mark got his material, and also why the other Synoptic Gospels, Matthew and Luke, follow Mark’s outline and often repeat him verbatim.

Modern scholars have cast doubt on this traditional view, though, noting that Papias wrote a good century after the fact and that we know nothing about the source he quotes.  And there are some goofs in geography in Mark which no Galilean like Peter would make.  Then again, many scholars date the Gospel to about the time of the Destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, around AD 70.  This would have been after Peter’s death, when he wouldn’t be around to correct the galley proofs.

The incident of the Young Man and his Towel is a peculiar one that seems pointless and irrelevant.  It seems to have nothing to do with the Great and Portentous events of the Passion Narrative; which may be why Matthew and Luke, who otherwise follow Mark’s outline pretty closely, make no mention of it.  I suspect that the reason why the author of Mark includes it must be that it had some personal meaning for him.  That’s why I think Tradition is right and Mark was that young man.  John Mark, the callow and inexperienced would-be-missionary of Acts chapter 13, could have been an adolescent at the time of Jesus’ trial, too young to participate, and only able to view it from a distance.  And he was living in Jerusalem at the time

Or perhaps not.  Perhaps the writer was someone else, and had some other reason for inserting the incident.  We can’t really know for sure.  But I like to think that this was Mark’s Brush With Greatness, the one moment when his own life intersected with that of Jesus, however peripherally.  And that, as embarrassing as it was, when he set down the stories he had heard about the ministry of Jesus, he included his own brief encounter.

The Sleazy Embezzler

There are some passages from the Gospels which are referred to as the “Hard Sayings of Jesus”; sometimes because they are hard to put into practice, as in the case of his admonition “If your eye offends you, pluck it out” or his remark about camels and needles; sometimes because they’re hard to understand and run counter to what we think we know.

The last is the case with a story Jesus told in Luke chapter 16, sometimes called The Dishonest Steward, but which I am going to call the Parable of the Sleazy Embezzler.

A certain rich man has learned that his steward, the servant hired to manage his business affairs, has been doing a crappy job of it.  The way Jesus puts it is that the guy “was accused of wasting [the Boss’s] possessions”, so he might not have actually been dipping into the till.  He might have just made some really bad decisions with the Boss’s money.  The Boss tells him that he’s going to audit the books to find out exactly what he’s been up to.

“The manager said to himself, ‘What shall I do now?  My master is taking away my job.  I’m not strong enough to dig, and I’m ashamed to beg…” (Luke 16:3 NIV)

Fortunately, our embezzler comes up with a Cunning Plan.  One by one, he calls in everyone who owes something and restructures their debt. 

“So he called in each one of his masters debtors.  He asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ “’Eight hundred gallons of olive oil,’ he replied. “The manager told him, ‘Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it four hundred.’  (v.5-6) 

He hasn’t been fired yet; he still has the authority to conduct business in his master’s name; and so he uses that authority to forgive a portion of the debt each man owes his boss.  That way, he figures, when he does lose his job, he’ll have plenty of people grateful to him who will be happy to help him out.

The Boss sees exactly what he’s done.  Since the debts were restructured in his name, he can’t very well go back and demand the full payment without looking like a jerk.  The most he can do is fire the dishonest steward – which he was going to do anyway – and it will look to the manager’s new friends that he was fired because he had done each of them a favor.

Some men might be pissed at the way the steward had outwitted him.  This boss seems to have had a sense of humor.  At least he was capable of recognizing the servant’s cleverness.  Jesus says, “The master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly.”  (v.8)

Commentators have puzzled over this parable for centuries.  Why is Jesus holding up this cheater, this crook, this embezzler up as an example?

Some interpreters have made excuses for him, saying that Jesus only said that the guy was accused of malfeasance, not of actually guilty of it.  Others have speculated that maybe his master had been overcharging his debtors in order to get around the Mosaic prohibition against charging interest, and that the steward was only converting the balance to what it should have been.

Both views are over-thinking things and missing the point.  If the manager had been innocent of wrongdoing, the audit would have exonerated him.  He knew it wouldn’t.  He knew he was toast.  And Jesus repeatedly calls him “dishonest.”  No, the fact that he’s a cheat who got caught and what he had to do to cover his butt is the whole point of the parable.

Another interpretation is that the steward’s reduction of what the debtors owe his master reflects him forgoing what his own commission of the transaction would be, deliberately sacrificing his own cut in order to do the right thing.  Once again, I think this is over-thinking the situation.  Jesus was telling the story to make a point, and if the point was the manager making amends for his misdeeds, Jesus would have said so.

The master does not commend his soon-to-be-ex manager for his virtue, but for his shrewdness.  In effect he’s saying, “You’re still fired, but I gotta admit, you’re a clever scoundrel!”

“For the people of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the people of the light.”  (Luke 16:8)

Elsewhere Jesus tells his disciples, “Be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves.”  (Matthew 10:16)  Or putting it in D&D terms, just because you’re Lawful Good in alignment doesn’t mean you have to be Lawful Stupid.

This next part gets even more confusing, because it seems to say one thing, and then Jesus does a complete 180 turn.  Or does he?  I think this is largely a translation issue.  The King James Version renders it this way:

“And I say unto you, Make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness; that when ye fail, they may receive you into everlasting habitations.”  (Luke 16:9 KJV) 

This makes it sound like we’re supposed to suck up to wealthy and ungodly people in order to gain… what?  Heaven?  This is the exact opposite of what Jesus says elsewhere, and of what he says in the following  verses for that matter.  Other translations, I think, are a little more clear:

“I tell you, use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves, so that when it is gone, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings.” (Luke 16:9 NIV)

This makes it a little more clear that the “mammon of unrighteousness” referred to in King Jim is simply our own secular, material wealth.  As a matter of simple Enlightened Self-Interest, we ought to use our wealth in such a way to “make friends”.  Another commentator goes back to the parable of the Sheep and the Goats in Matthew 25 in which the Son of Man judges the people gathered before him based on how well they treated their neighbors, because “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.”  (Matthew 25:40)

Jesus concludes this discourse on money with a more famous remark: “No servant can serve two masters …  Ye cannot serve God and mammon.”  (Luke 16:13 KJV)  Mammon is a Semitic word for money or riches, and Jesus uses it as a personification of materialism.  In the Middle Ages the word was used as a name for a demon of greed.

And if this sounds like a bunch of anti-capitalist hippie crap, the Pharisees thought so too: 

The Pharisees, who loved money, heard all this and were sneering at Jesus.  He said to them, “You are the ones who justify yourselves in the eyes of men, but God knows your hearts.  What is highly valued among men is detestable in God’s sight.  (Luke 16:14-15)

I guess even a sleazy embezzler can be smart enough to keep an eye on the changing exchange rates.

Goofus and Gallant in the Vineyard

My parents never subscribed to Highlights for Children -- I preferred Children’s Digest because it ran Tintin adventures – but occasionally I would read the magazine when I was little in the waiting room of the doctor’s office.  On for the regular features that use to run in Highlights – (and probably still does; Highlights will exist as long as there are pediatrician clinics) – was a cartoon called “Goofus and Gallant”.

If you’ve ever read Highlights, I’m sure you’ve seen it.  Gallant and Goofus are two brothers; at least I’ve always assumed they are related.  The first panel would show Gallant doing something polite and respectful; say, helping an old lady across the street; and the second panel would show Goofus in the same situation doing something stupid; like taking cell phone video of the old lady getting hit by a car to post on YouTube.

There was no plot to these cartoons; just the salutary example of the Good Boy contrasted with the deplorable example of the Bad one.  Sometimes Goofus would go first, sometimes Gallant; but the strip always gave us this nice contrast between the Right Way and the Wrong Way.

This kind of dualism is a natural way to convey a moral message: Good vs. Evil; Virtue vs. Vice; Minneapolis vs. St. Paul.  It’s not surprising that Jesus used this kind of comparison in one of his parables.

What is surprising is that he did it wrong.

“What do you think?  There was a man who had two sons.  He went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work today in the vineyard.’ “‘I will not,’ he answered, but later he changed his mind and went. “Then the father went to the other son and said the same thing.  He answered, ‘I will, sir,’ but he did not go.” (Matthew 21:28-30 NIV)

That’s not how it’s supposed to go!  He mixed the brothers up!  It’s as if Goofus set the table for dinner and Gallant stuck lima beans up his nose.  How could Jesus make such a mistake?

Maybe because Jesus wanted to convey a different message.

Let’s back up a bit and look at the context.  On the occasion he told this parable, Jesus was teaching in the temple courts in Jerusalem, one of the plazas within the walls of the Temple, but outside the building itself.  There he encountered some of the chief priests and elders of people who wanted to know where the hell he got the idea he could set himself up as some kind of a prophet.  “By what authority are you doing these things … And who gave you this authority?” (Matthew 21:23)

Perhaps they were genuinely curious as to the source of his teachings, but given Jesus’ response, I suspect they were hoping he’d say something they could use against him.

Jesus answers with a question of his own:

Jesus replied, “I will also ask you one question.  If you answer me, I will tell you by what authority I am doing these things.  John’s baptism – where did it come from?  Was it from heaven, or from men?”  (Matthew 21:24-25)

He threw the “Gotcha” question right back at them.  John the Baptist had died only a year or two before and was widely regarded as a prophet.  If the authorities agreed that he was a messenger from God, Jesus could reasonably ask why they ignored him.  On the other hand, if they said that John was just a guy with no divine mandate, they’d be going against popular opinion.

Unwilling to commit themselves, they replied “We don’t know.”  And so Jesus said “Neither will I tell you by what authority I am doing these things.”  (Matthew 21:27)

Now, at first glance, this exchange doesn’t seem to have much connection to the parable Jesus tells immediately afterward; but considering who his audience at the time, it’s pretty obvious whom Jesus intended the second son to represent:  the religious elites, the self-righteous ones who uttered pious platitudes, but whose lives reflected neither God’s justice, nor his compassion.  And if the priests saw this pointed at themselves, well, if the funny hat don’t fit, you don’t gots to wear it.

At the end of his parable, Jesus asks these priests, which of the two sons did what his father wanted?  They had to answer, “The first.”

Who, then, does the first son represent?  Jesus tells them, and brings the parable back to the point he made earlier:

Jesus said to them, “I tell you the truth, the tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you.  For John came to you to show you the way of righteousness, and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes did.  And even after you saw this, you did not repent and believe him.”  (Matthew 21:31-32)

“Prostitutes and tax collectors” are often used in the Gospel as a shorthand for people considered social outcasts for their wickedness:  prostitutes because they lived outside the approved sexual mores, and tax collectors because they were essentially collaborationists, private contractors hired by the occupying Romans to collect taxes, who profited by collecting more than Rome required and pocketing the difference.  The Gospels often lump “sinners and tax collectors” together in the same group.

TO me this parable says two things.  Most obviously, it condemns the hypocrite who talks the talk, but who shows far less nimbleness in the walking department.  Christians like to call this type of behavior pharisaical, although that’s grossly unfair because it paints a simplistic view of what the Pharisees taught and because it lets the Sadducees, who also opposed Jesus, completely off the hook, not to mention the Herodians.  Singling out the Pharisees also lets us pretend that we today aren’t also guilty of obsessing about the letter of the Law while blowing off the spirit.

But Goofus and Gallant are all about compare and contrast.  While the Parable of the Brothers in the Vineyard condemns the hypocrite, it also commends the person who outwardly seems to be ungodly, at least by the prissy, external criteria of the hypocrite, but who nevertheless strives to be charitable, decent and ethical in his personal life.

I have to admit that a lot of Christians have trouble with this.  I was raised in the Lutheran tradition, which emphasizes that we are saved by God’s Grace, not by our own Good Works, and which regards the doctrine of “Works Righteousness” as an anathema.  We like to quote the passage from Isaiah that “… all our righteous acts are like filthy rags…” (Isaiah 64:6)

But I think we make too much of that verse.  My own Good Works may indeed be worthless – for the purposes of buying my way into Heaven – but they have value in other respects.

For one thing, we are told that it pleases God when we do his will, even if we don’t wholly succeed in our attempts.  That in itself is a biggie.  For another, the Good Works that we do are how we respond to God’s love for us.  As James puts it:  “Show me your faith without deed, and I will show you my faith by what I do. … As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without deeds is dead.” (James 2:18,26)

But perhaps most importantly, from a strictly practical point of view, doing Good Works makes our world a better place.  You don’t need to believe in the Gospel of Christ to understand that; you don’t even have to believe in God.

I’ve heard some Christians express the perverse notion that Good Works are only virtuous when they are performed by Bible-believing Christians, and that works performed by anybody else, no matter what the intention, is self-serving and sinful.  I can’t agree.  An act which helps my neighbor helps my neighbor and this is true whether I am trying to follow God’s Law or the promptings of my own conscience.  It certainly makes no difference to my neighbor.

“But surely,” one might say, “it is better still to respect God AND to obey his Commandments!”  Well, there is that.  That’s the problem with dualistic examples like Goofus and Gallant; they provide two contrasting examples with no gradations of nuance in-between.  But by focusing on this particular contrast in this particular parable, Jesus is telling us to look at the results rather than what color jersey a person is wearing and if they’re on “our team”.

“By their fruit you will recognize them,” Jesus says in another place,  (Matthew 7:20)  That’s how you can really tell Goofus from Gallant.

God Hates Figs?

Biblical scholars tend to be suspicious of passages in the Gospels that dovetail too neatly with Church Doctrine.  “Did Jesus really say that?” they ask, “Or did the Gospel writer or even a later editor invent it?”  And I have to admit, they may have a point.

But there’s a flip side to this reasoning too.  By the same logic, a passage that’s embarrassing to a respected figure, or conflicts with some aspects of established theology, is more likely to be authentic, because presumably the Early Church Fathers would have edited it out if it weren’t firmly established.  It’s sort of like Tertulian’s famous statement, Certum est, quia impossibile - It is certain because it is impossible.  Although in this case it’s more a matter of “It’s certain because if they had made it up they would have invented something less weird.”

If there’s any truth to this theory, then certainly the most authentic passage in the Gospels would have to be the story of Jesus and the Fig Tree.

The story is found in Mark, chapter 11.  Mark is kind of like the Cliff Notes Gospel; it’s the shortest of the four, and it’s pretty fast-paced, going from incident to incident without nearly as many of the parables and discourses which we find in the other Gospels.  Both Matthew and Luke follow the same outline as Mark, often quoting it word-for-word, which leads most scholars to believe that Mark was written first and that the other two Synoptic Gospels used it as a framework which they supplemented with additional material.

But there are a couple places where Mark digresses from his straightforward narrative to mention a side-incident which seems irrelevant to the main story.  The Fig Tree Story is one of these.

Jesus and his disciples have come to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover.  They’re staying, however, in the nearby town of Bethany, perhaps with Jesus’ friends, Mary and Martha and Lazarus, because the hotels in Jerusalem are always booked up on the holidays.

While leaving Bethany the next morning to go up into the city, Jesus is hungry and sees a fig tree in the distance.  But when he goes to the tree to check out if there’s any fruit on it, he finds nothing but leaves.  This pisses him off.  “May no one ever eat fruit from you again,” he says.  (Mark 11:12-14)

And that’s where Mark leaves it for the moment.  He goes on to describe Jesus driving the moneychangers from the Temple.  And come to think of it, this might be why he’s so hard on those moneychangers; he’s hungry and the whole fig tree thing put him in a bad mood.  After a busy day of Occupying Temple Mount, he and his disciples return to Bethany for the night.  The next day they pass by the fig tree again, only now it is withered.  “Rabbi, look!” Peter says, “The fig tree you cursed is withered!”  (Mark 11:20-21)

The Gospel of Matthew, chapter 21:18-21, also tells this story, but in Matthew’s version, the tree withers immediately.  It’s more dramatic that way, and from a plot point of view tightens up the narrative better, but I think I prefer Mark’s telling.)

Jesus responds by telling his disciples to “Have faith in God” and that if they believe hard enough, they’ll be able to do all sorts of crazy stuff like making mountains jump into the sea or forgiving sins.  But the story has always left me dazed and wondering what the heck that was all about.  Probably much the way the Disciples must have been.

This is not the moral I was expecting.  I would have expected him to say something like “So too will perish those who bear not Fruits of Righteousness” or something along those lines.  Nope.  Instead he talks about Faith and the Power of Prayer.

Why did Jesus curse the stupid tree?  A pious impulse wants me to say that it was a sinful fig tree and therefore deserved to be cursed.

Hm.

Yes, that seems just as stupid when I type it out as it does in my head when I think it.  What’s more, Mark comes right out and tells us that the reason the fig tree didn’t have any figs on it was because it was the wrong season!  (“… When he reached it, he found nothing but leaves, because it was not the season for figs.”  Mark 11:13)

So then the question becomes, why did Jesus expect there to be figs in the first place?  My study Bible tries to finesse this by noting that fig trees in that region normally begin to leaf out around March or April, but do not bear figs until their leaves are all out in early Summer.  So maybe Jesus, seeing that the tree already had a lot of leaves on it, thought that it might have some early figs too.  I’d say that was grasping at straws, except that you won’t find straws on a fig tree at that time of the year either.  Jesus still comes off seeming like a jerk for cursing a perfectly innocent fig tree that was minding its own business.  I don’t have an answer for that.  This is the story we have.

Why did the Gospel writers include this curious story?  Perhaps as a demonstration of Christ’s Divine Power over Nature.  Or perhaps to illustrate his words about the Power of Prayer.  But I think it was something that stuck in Peter’s mind because it was just so dang freaky.

Backing up a little, the Gospel of Mark is traditionally ascribed to John-Mark, a young man who served as an assistant to the Apostle Peter in his later years.  (We know Peter had a secretary, because of the two Epistles credited to him, the Greek in the first one is much better than the other.  Since Greek wasn’t Peter’s primary language, it’s believed that he had an assistant polish up his prose).  If this is true, than Mark’s Gospel would have been based on Peter’s reminiscences.

This would explain how Mark, who was not one of the Twelve Disciples, nor is ever mentioned by name in any of the other Gospels, got his material; and why Matthew and Luke defer to Mark’s version of the story in their own Gospels.  Modern scholarship has cast doubt on the Peter-Mark connection, though, noting places in Mark’s gospel where he gets details of Galilee geography wrong; mistakes that presumably Peter would not make.  Then again, it’s possible that Mark did not set down the final version of his Gospel until after Peter’s death; (most scholars date the Gospel after the destruction of the Temple in AD 70); and so Peter would have been unable to correct these goofs.

But supposing tradition has it right about Peter and Mark, I can picture Peter telling stories to his own disciple about his experiences.  “I remember this one time … man, it was the freakiest thing … we were leaving Bethany and there was this fig tree…”  He would have told about the things that stuck most in his memory.

What strikes me the most about this story, though, is not the demonstration of Christ’s Divine Power over Deciduous Plants, but glimpse we get of Jesus the man, with human needs and human frustrations.

The Church has traditionally taught that Jesus was True God and Also True Man.  So how can he be both?  I don’t know.  How can light be both a wave and a particle?  From observation we know that light acts like both.  And the Doctrine of the Dual Nature is one of the ideas Christians have developed to explain this aspect of Christ.  The way Luther explains this is that if Christ were merely a man, his sacrifice would be insufficient to redeem all humanity; but if he were merely a god, (if that makes sense), then his life on earth would be meaningless; he’d just be a poseur pretending to be one of us.

Christians tend to put more emphasis on the “True God” part, though, because Christ’s humanity can make us uncomfortable sometimes; as in this story.  He knew hunger; he knew aggravation; he got frustrated when his disciples missed the point; he got sarcastic when his enemies tried to trap him in word games; he wept when his friends suffered bereavement; he crashed in the bottom of a fishing boat when he’d had a long, tiring day; and there were some times when the world got too much for him and he just needed some time by himself.

Here he got pissed off and yelled at a tree.  As someone who frequently yells at inanimate objects myself, I can wholly empathize.