We continue our every-Sunday-celebration of the 30th anniversary of Binding The Strong Man, Ched Myers’ political reading of Mark’s Gospel. This week, the lectionary gifts us with an episode from Mark’s Gospel where Jesus deals with obstacles to an integrated community.

This episode resumes Mark’s polemic against the Pharisaic movement, begun in Mark 2:15, over the issue of the purity code as it defines the propriety of table fellowship…The issue at hand is maintenance of strict group boundaries, represented here by practices of ritual purity and dietary restriction. The Pharisees defend the purity code as fundamental to the ethnic and national identity of the people; Jesus repudiates these exclusivist definitions by attacking their ideological foundations… Continue reading “Attacking Their Ideological Foundations” →

We continue our every-Sunday-celebration of the 30th anniversary of Binding The Strong Man, Ched Myers’ political reading of Mark’s Gospel. This portion is excerpted from the book’s “Aftermath” entitled On Continuing the Narrative of Biblical Radicalism.

The empty tomb at the end of Mark’s Gospel symbolizes that his story, like its subject Jesus, has not ended but lives on. Just as Mark reached back across the centuries to bring the “old story” of Hebrew prophetic radicalism to life again in a new story about Jesus of Nazareth, so does he reach forward across the ages to us, challenging us to continue the story by “returning to Galilee” (Mark 16:7). But how is it that an invitation to “reread” this story is politically subversive? Does not the circle of narrative actually lead the reader away from practice, shutting out the real world and seducing us with one that exists only in our imagination? This is certainly what those who dismiss the fictions of apocalyptic narrative as the wish-dreams of the alienated would have us believe. Continue reading “Our Script” →