Marilynne Robinson - The Givenness of Things

Whether or not Mark was the first Gospel to be written, I assume there was conversation and correspondence among the leaders of the congregations and a sharing of experience among them that would yield differences in approach to the work of making their good news accessible and faithful to its meaning as they understood it. A hypothetical Mark might say, If the Holy Spirit is carrying the Gospel into the whole world, then why recite these genealogies even to dismiss them? If the Annunciation sounds to pagans like stories they have heard all their lives, why start there, when the very life of Christ can justify every claim made for his birth? I venture my hypothesis on the grounds that the Gospel of Mark is impressively strong and self-consistent, not crude or tentative or fragmentary.

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All three Gospels contain some account of Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness. Matthew deals with it in eleven verses, Luke in thirteen, Mark in only two. In each case, the testing of Jesus comes after his baptism by John. Matthew and Luke have made the case for Jesus’ divinity or his identity as Messiah and dealt with arguments against it that would arise among people who were aware of the nature of the expectation within Israel. Mark begins with the baptism, profoundly meaningful in itself but no part of the expectation. He omits the teaching of John reported in the other Gospels, which is in the tradition of the Hebrew prophets, and retains only his acclamation of Jesus as the Christ.

If the birth narratives and the genealogies of Matthew and Luke establish who Jesus is not — that is, not the inheritor of an identity foreseen and defined in the expectations of his people — and if at the same time they establish who he is — that is, the Son of God — then a question arises very naturally: How does such a being live in the world? If his divine nature is granted, what shape and content will it impart to his singular, mortal life? The Adversary taunts Jesus the Son of God with the fact of his own power. He need not be hungry; he could instantly seize all earthly station and wealth; he need not die. Jesus answers, “It is written,” quoting Deuteronomy in response to every temptation the Devil offers. According to the Gospels the devils are knowing, and here we have, in effect, the testimony of Satan that Jesus possesses the power and authority he has also put aside, that his humanity is both real and a chosen restraint. This dialogue between the Devil and the Son of God might be thought of, so soon after the spectacle of his baptism, as a cosmic rather than a historic moment in which Jesus assumes, so to speak, the full panoply of the mortal condition. Milton’s Paradise Regained is simply a retelling of the Temptation, reasonably enough.

I have spent too many years reading manuscripts not to wonder from whose point of view this story in Matthew and Luke is told. Jesus had no disciples, no companions, during those forty days. I think of the story as a sort of epitome of Jesus’ teaching about himself, explicit and implicit. It has a folkloric quality that is not typical of Gospel narrative. I think it should be thought of as a kind of midrash. By “midrash” I mean a proposed interpretation of a text or a tradition that takes the form of narrative. That this passage is interpretation seems to me to be supported by the fact that no speech is attributed to Jesus except the language of the Torah, and these might very probably be laws he was heard to quote. In other words, presumption is avoided. There is no invention of Jesus, as there is of Satan.

His going into the wilderness, as Mark agrees that he did do, is a very human act. Fasting and solitude are extraordinarily human experiences. In accepting them, “driven by the Spirit,” Mark says, Jesus is following the discipline of the prophets. So, taking those forty days as its frame, the midrash, if it is one, establishes and elaborates a meaning already implicit in his time in the wilderness. It has great relevance to questions the disciples must have asked themselves — Why did he sometimes suffer hunger or thirst? Why did he not calm the world’s turbulence as he did the sea’s, with a rebuke? Why did he have to die? And, what enlightenment could come to him by fasting in the wilderness, he being the Son of God? The answer is that he chose to relate to reality in the way of a pious man, honoring God, and at the same time honoring the laws of Moses by accepting the obedience that identified him as a Jew, a son of Abraham. More than all this is the fact that in this passage he dismisses the promises of power and preeminence that were thought to have been made to biblical kings and to the Christ — of which this Satan is clearly well aware, and the writers of Matthew and Luke and the audience they addressed were aware also. Instead Jesus identifies with generic “man”—“Man does not live by bread alone.” Presumably nearly every word the tempter says is true. Jesus could indeed have done any of the things Satan proposes — except, no doubt, to worship him. Then again, to have done any of these things would have been to abandon his meaning and intent. So an old-fashioned theological question arises, whether God could indeed act against his own nature, which in the Christian narrative is expressed in this embrace of servanthood. Clearly, if God cannot act against his own nature, then his nature is expressed in Christ. “And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.” So a profound theological assertion is made here.

These mysteries were perhaps raised and answered more directly when they were new. What could it mean to say that God might be tempted to act like God, to assert the power that is intrinsic to his nature? “Though he was in the form of God, [he] did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.” This encounter with the Devil refers beyond itself to a very great question — If God is God, why does he permit evil and suffering and death? The response of the Christian narrative, that God has not exempted himself from these things, is not an answer to the question. It is, however, a vision of the nature of God that is the fullest assurance one could imagine of his loyalty to humankind and his love and respect for it. There is much that is thrilling and telling in the thought that true divinity can assume the place of a human being and yet remain an ordinary man to every mortal eye.

In any case, never mentioning the phrase, this story of the Temptation gives content to Jesus’ self-characterization as a, and the, Son of Man. Luke’s telling of it differs from Matthew’s in the order though not the substance of the temptations. The laws or instructions of Moses by which Jesus defines the place he will take in the world are the same in both. It seems reasonable to suppose these laws are the mnemonic that stabilizes the story, since it would seem to have less claim to authority than teaching attributed to Jesus directly. Luke does draw an available conclusion from Satan’s offering Jesus the glory and authority of all the kingdoms of the world. “For it has been delivered to me,” says the Devil, “and I give it to whom I will.”

What in all this might my hypothetical Mark have thought it best to exclude? As a form of reasoning, midrash would have been alien to Gentile hearers. It may bear some resemblance to the “myths” or “fables” Paul warns against in 1 Timothy. And even if it had currency among the holiest and profoundest Christian teachers in Jerusalem, it is not and does not offer itself as witness. Like the genealogies, which are also theological statements, not witness, it does seem to address the doubts of the skeptical. Granting miracles and healings, why was Jesus not more godlike? The character he takes on in this story is indeed his character in life. The Temple authorities might have questioned his piety and his humility. But by the standards of the great prophets, say, he led a mild and quiet life, invisible to the world until his thirtieth year. Why should this have been true? Why no grandeur, why no show of power? How could he have been vulnerable to death? The story of the Temptation means that he chose to live within the limits of humanity — thus are the skeptics answered. In Mark we have a forceful Christ who seems to be moving always, impatiently, toward Jerusalem and his culminating death. It is as if Mark would say, with all emphasis, that Jesus did not suffer death but sought it. No need to rationalize apparent weakness when the Crucifixion was an act of divine power, both in the Son who passed through death and in the Father who transformed creation by means of this death. I do not intend by this Trinitarian language to create a distinction between the will and act of Christ on one hand and of God on the other, or to invoke the idea of expiatory sacrifice, Christ dying to mollify God. The Christ of Mark reminds me of the Old English poem “The Dream of the Rood.” In it the poet, speaking in the person of the cross, sees “the Lord of men, hasting with mighty, steadfast heart,” to mount the cross. He says, “The Hero young — He was Almighty God.”