(The Nationalist, 23 June 2006)
When I was a missionary in Zambia I remember hearing a story of how the first bishop of the diocese was said to have raised a dead man to life. I asked about this of a friar in the mission where it was reputed to have happened. He explained that the bishop had left the house early in the morning to go to his car, which was in the garage. Walking across the garden, he found a man lying motionless on the ground. ‘Was he dead?’ I asked. ‘No’, replied my confrère, ‘but he was dead drunk’. The bishop shook him to see if he was alright; the man woke, stood up, having slept off the worst of his hangover, and went home. Some people saw this, put 2 and 2 together, and made 22 of it.
In Mark’s gospel, there is a story of Jesus calming a storm on the Sea of Galilee. Was it something like the story of the bishop and the “dead” man? It is known that storms blow up suddenly there, and calm down again as quickly. Was it such an incident, and Jesus wakened when the storm was about to abate, and then a creative imagination went to work on the incident, possibly recalling the psalm (107), ‘He made the storm be still, and the waves of the sea were hushed’ – and the story grew as it was re-told, until it came to be accepted as fact?
Is the account to be taken literally? Did Jesus truly calm the sea with a word? Or did Mark create the story, leaving his hearers to make the association between the action of God and a similar action of Jesus, with its corollary? Jews have a long tradition of story-telling.
Mark, in the story, has Jesus asserting saving power over the sea. His point seems to be that, if Jesus does works which are proper to God alone, then there is a conclusion to be drawn: Jesus is God in human form.
I can recall being hailed as a miracle-worker when a man whom I anointed with the sacrament of the sick recovered promptly. His family were surprised, delighted and grateful. They attributed it to me. I was embarrassed by their adulation, and said I thought a more likely explanation was that he had responded to the right medicine.
There is a large gap between the understanding of the bible that scripture scholars have and that of the ordinary man and woman in the pew, and it leads to much misunderstanding.
For those in a hurry: ‘Jesus Christ was not crucified on an altar in a church between two candles, but on a cross in a rubbish dump between two thieves.’ (George MacLeod of the Iona community)