Jesus, Disciple of the Kingdom. Osvaldo D. Vena
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life of the church.
The need to see Jesus as the example of true discipleship grows directly out of my own journey24 in the Christian faith. I reached a point where theories of atonement and heavenly rewards became totally irrelevant for my life, and Jesus’ question in Mark, “Who do you say that I am,” now personalized as “What does Osvaldo think that I am?” 25 was asked anew. It is the Christological question. And the only answer that made sense to me26 was that Jesus is the supreme example for a life of discipleship that is understood as the construction of a new order,27 a new society. And I found ample justification for this new understanding in the Markan story of Jesus. The metaphor that I like to use is that of Jacob wrestling with the man at Peniel in Genesis 32:26. When the man (angel?) wanted to leave, Jacob said: “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.” My hermeneutical struggle with the text has resulted, in the end, in blessing. But like Jacob after the encounter with God disguised as an angel, I am not the person I used to be. My theological walk has changed. Now I am limping, forever affected by the encounter, and people, especially traditional Bible scholars, notice it. My walking is irregular because it acknowledges the paradoxes of life and the way they affect the interpretation of the text. Now my social location precedes me as I delve into the text in search for answers.28
Such an endeavor is a reconstruction, or better yet, a construction.29 It is not offered so it will replace other constructions, but in the hope that it will contribute to a host of other images and views of Jesus that have been proposed throughout history. My only ethical exigency is that the model I propose will result in liberation, giving of life instead of taking it away from people. This general goal is unpacked by Schüssler Fiorenza when she says that any historical-Jesus research should be mindful of not reinscribing, in and through its scholarly discourse, the anti-Judaism inscribed in the gospels; that it should consider how much it has contributed to the liberation or oppression of women and other minorities around the world; that it should criticize the ideologies of colonization and domination that often use the biblical text as justification for their colonial agenda; and that it should assess whether or not it promotes a politics of exclusivity, inferiority, prejudice, and dehumanization when it comes to cultural or religious identity formation.30 Furthermore, my model has to prove that it can coexist peacefully with these four areas of concern. At the end of the book, I evaluate whether or not this has been the case.
Challenges to the Present Work
To speak of Jesus as disciple presents us with many challenges. First and foremost, there is the text of the New Testament: in no place does Jesus speak of himself—nor is spoken of by others—as a disciple of anybody.31 Jesus is either the teacher, the Lord, the Logos, one with the Father and so on. Therefore, searching for this model will prove to involve a bit of detective work. We have to look at passages32 where Jesus is “functioning” as a disciple or is speaking of himself in discipleship categories, or using terms such as “servant”33 or “slave” that present him in a less exalted manner. These representations will have to be seen as synonymous or similar to discipleship, if not historically at least theologically and literarily. In that sense, Lone Fatum has said:
A Gospel text may seem descriptive or narrative; in effect, however, it is prescriptive, as we know, and its purpose is to demonstrate to its Christian audience what it means to believe in Christ and to live the social lives of committed Christians. This implies that Jesus does not appear in the various texts as a human being or as a historical person of individual quality, but rather as the Christ of a particular congregation. Jesus as well as the people around him are actors in the reality of the text, and we know them only as such. We meet them playing their parts in the adaptation of Christian meaning that is the deliberate purpose of the text. In other words, in a particular Gospel text both Jesus and the people around him are bearers of just those symbolic values on which the universe of Christian plausibility is structured and meant to be sustained in a particular congregation. But, to be sure, an author is responsible for the literary construction as well as the deliberate staging of the actors as narrative agents, and so the author is present in the text as the structuring consciousness, as is the historical audience the author implies within the construction.34
A number of observations are in order here. First, the prescriptive nature of the narrative: Mark is not trying to describe the way Jesus was, but rather, to convince his congregation of how he should be understood. Second, this version is one geared toward a particular congregation. His Christ is the Christ of the Markan community, a group of believers that were undergoing a challenging time, as we will see. In that sense, they were different from the Matthean, Lukan, or the Johannine congregations. Third, Jesus and the people around him are actors in the reality of the text, bearers of the symbolic values that made possible the Christian universe. In this universe, discipleship is a prominent category. And fourth, the author is responsible for the construction, and therefore, present in the text as the structuring consciousness. One of the many ways in which this is implemented is through the rhetorical devices utilized by the evangelist, the most important of which may be the chiastic structure that I propose in chapter 2.
Seeing the text as prescriptive and as a construction will help me in my own endeavor, for I am not trying to discover the meaning already present in the text, but to construct one that I hope convinces the reader of the plausibility of such an interpretation, namely, that Jesus can be seen in the Gospel of Mark as the example par excellence of discipleship. Mark’s narrative utilizes oral and written traditions about Jesus and fixes them in a text that is constructed to convey his understanding of who Jesus was, what he did, and how his life, death, and resurrection affected the life of his community. Mark’s endeavor is not historicist, but theological and pastoral. Therefore, he embarks in the writing of a story where Jesus is present as a literary character more than as a historical personage. But Mark still has at his disposal vivid and lively traditions about the historical Jesus, memories of his words and deeds that were still very much alive among the believers. He is not constructing the character of Jesus out of thin air, but is basing it on the historical memory of the community. I don’t have that. I have Mark’s text, the only way to get to the historical Jesus via a (re)construction by the evangelist, whereby oral traditions, written texts, and plain memories come together under the theological supervision of the author to render a portrayal of Jesus that serves the needs of his community. But I also have, which Mark did not, a history of interpretation of the text, the way in which the church has ascribed meaning to the life of Jesus during two millennia and which conditions the way I read the text. And I also have my own reaction to that history of interpretation, which makes me privilege certain readings over others, in a similar fashion as the evangelist privileged certain traditions over others.35
Whereas the first challenge, the witness of the text of the New Testament in general and Mark in particular, is literary and rhetorical, the second, conceptualizing Jesus as a disciple of the kingdom, is theological. It requires admitting that there was an element of learning and obedience in the way Jesus approached his ministry. And this is something very difficult for orthodox scholars to accept, even when faced with the fact that a cursory reading of the gospels seems to suggest the possibility that John the Baptist may have been Jesus’ teacher. Not only that, but Jesus’ subjection to God, something again made plain by the gospel writers, is often missed in some Christologies, although not by the author of Hebrews, who declares in 5:8 that “Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered.”