Power Over the Religious Establishment
In
our final examination of authority in Mark 5, it can be reasonably ascertained
that Jesus’ conflict with the Gerasene demoniac serves as a critique of the
religious establishment of first-century Second Temple Judaism. In his book Nonviolent
Story, Robert Beck observes that the ritual
world of Jesus’ social context involved a sort of “sacred topography”: a series
of geographical arenas originating with the Holy of Holies in the temple and
radiating outward in descending levels of cleanliness/holiness.[1]
These artificial barriers served not only to separate the Jews from the
“unclean” gentiles, but also to establish distinctions between various classes
of Judeans. According to Beck, the presence of an unclean spirit in Mark 5
“belongs to the wider symbolic realm of Judaic ritual where the unclean is
posed as an opposite to holiness, and not simply to cleanliness.”[2]
By entering into Gerasa and healing a man with unclean spirits, Jesus
transgresses against the clean/unclean socio-religious system in three primary
ways:
1) By setting foot in a gentile territory and
furthermore fraternizing with said gentiles, Jesus becomes by extension
unclean. Curiously, this appears to be the sole
motivation—narratively speaking—for Jesus’ venturing
into the region in the first place. It is the only action occurring in Gerasa
mentioned in the Gospel. Following the sending forth of the healed demoniac,
Jesus immediately returns to the other side of the lake. This suggests that the
action was intentional, perhaps symbolic.
2) The proximity of Jesus to the tombs in which the
tormented man lived is ritually problematic, and the act of exorcism is itself
carried out in a graveyard. Cemeteries in general were considered unclean
locales due to their population of corpses; for this reason, according to
custom all Jews were buried outside the gates of the city to prevent any
regular contact with dead bodies. Not only is Jesus associating with gentiles,
he is associating with gentiles in a cemetery.
3) The presence of swine—the most vile creatures
imaginable to a Jew concerned with ritual cleanliness—is the third strike
against Jesus. As mentioned earlier, the pigs are likely to be metaphorical,
perhaps even comical. But their presence in the narrative (along with the two
other unclean elements listed above) should be enough to alert the reader that
Jesus has managed to walk into a setting that is ritually unclean in almost
every capacity and yet still emerge by the end of the narrative as the one
powerful enough to “bind the strong man.”
Beck
notes, “Mark presents the Judean establishment’s system of barriers and
preventions as ineffectual. The only effective opposition to the unclean power
is the holy power invested in the protagonist Jesus…Holiness understood in a
system of opposition to the unclean is rejected for its inhumane qualities and
therefore rejected as an inadequate attribute or image of the compassionate
God.”[3]
In other words, Jesus asserts himself as one with greater authority than those
who carry on with the outdated holiness system of the temple, and in doing so
he exudes a new image of the divine among the impure. In casting Legion from
this tortured gentile, Jesus has done what no synagogue or temple authority can
do: make clean that which is by nature unclean.
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