Binding the Strong Man

No one can break into a strong man's house and plunder his goods unless the strong man is first bound; then the house may be plundered. - Mark 3:27

We have seen from Mark's prologue that the advent of good news shakes the foundations of life as usual (Mark 1:1-15). The day of the Lord, portended by the coming of Elijah, has dawned not by cataclysm, but in the practice of Jesus of Nazareth, who calls common people to join him in challenging the social order (1:15-28).

Mark now turns to sketch a portrait of Jesus' public ministry in and around the Galilean city of Capernaum. This first major narrative section begins (1:16f.) and ends by the shores of the Sea of Galilee (4:1). It articulates the character of the Messianic mission: healing and exorcism, proclamation and confrontation.

Having served notice to the scribal establishment that its authority is being challenged (1:21-28), Jesus begins his compassionate ministry to the poor (1:29-34). Almost immediately, however, he encounters opposition from these same scribes (2:6). Indeed, hostility from the local public authorities builds throughout the section into a double climax of polarization. In the wake of his dramatic public healing in defiance of Sabbath law (3:1-5), provincial officials begin plotting Jesus' demise (3:6). Meanwhile, a government investigation is launched (3:22-30), causing even Jesus' own family to withdraw their support for his mission (3:21,31f.).

THIS NARRATIVE PRESENTS the modern reader with a dilemma, for we must explain why it is that Jesus engenders so much opposition. It cannot be attributed to political intolerance of miracle workers, since healers and magicians abounded and practiced freely in Hellenistic Jewish society. Nor are the authorities at this point raising the issue of Jesus' alleged political claims (Messiahship); besides, Jesus strenuously suppresses speculation about his identity (see 1:25,34; 3:12; 5:43; 7:36).

It must be that there is more to these healing and exorcism stories than is immediately obvious to us. In a previous study ("In Word and Deed," January 1987), I suggested that Jesus' exorcisms were portrayed by Mark as a kind of symbolic action which articulated Jesus' confrontation with the dominant sociopolitical order. This is equally true of Jesus' healings.

Again we must remember the cross-cultural dimensions of reading biblical narrative. We tend to assume that healing stories speak of the miraculous cure of physical pathologies, because in our modern worldview illness is equated with biological disorders (in medical anthropology this is called a bio-medical definition of illness). The ancient world, however, perceived illness primarily as a socially disvalued state (an ethno-medical definition) - that is, an aberrant condition that threatened communal integrity.

For example, what the biblical writers call leprosy cannot be identified with what we know (biomedically) as Hansen's Disease. Their concern, however, was not scientific diagnosis of symptoms but the determination of social abnormalities requiring quarantine. In the cultural system of Judaism, these were associated with impurity or sin. From the ethnomedical perspective, then, healing was a matter first and foremost of resocializing the anomalous person. Hence the rituals associated with the cleansing of leprosy (see Leviticus 13-14) concerned not medical cure but symbolic re-entry into the community.

We will see that in every major healing episode in Mark, Jesus seeks to restore the personal and social wholeness denied to the sick by a sociocultural system which marginalizes them. His healing acts are symbolic actions directed as much at the system as the individual. Obviously, to understand the power of this action we must know something about these cultural systems and how they functioned in the social world presumed in Mark's story.

The image of a young man burning a draft card outside of the White House in 1969 might seem an innocuous act of petty arson to a sociocultural outsider. But the symbolic discourse of such action becomes far more significant once the historical context is understood. This context includes the social codes (draft laws), sites (the president's residence as representative of a country's foreign policy), and groups (anti-war protesters vs. architects of a controversial military intervention). Jesus' actions provoke political opposition precisely because they systematically challenge the social codes, sites, and groups which ordered life and meaning in Palestinian Judaism during the late second temple period.

It is crucial to remind ourselves again that there was no differentiation between the sacred and secular in antiquity. Torah (the Mosaic law), to us a religious text, functioned then as the fundamental legal code. So when Jesus engages in debate concerning scripture, he is involved in the most fundamental kind of social criticism. Similarly, when he challenges the temple cultus, he is subverting the center of political authority and national identity, and threatening those whose social status is bound to the temple-state. When he clashes with priest and scribe, he is taking on senior administrators who are spokespersons for the dominant ideology.

IF WE KEEP THIS IN MIND, we can see Mark's narrative of Jesus' Capernaum ministry as one of direct action. We pick up the story with Jesus' healing of Peter's mother-in-law in the privacy of the family home (1:30f.). Jesus commences his public ministry of healing only after the sun had set (at the conclusion of the Sabbath, 1:32), implying that there is something controversial about what he has done behind closed doors. This does not become fully clear until the first climax of the campaign, in which Jesus openly heals a man in a synagogue on the Sabbath - with dire consequences (3:1-6).

From the outset Jesus the healer experiences the incessant press of needy masses, as indicated in the summary statement in 1:32-39. This is an accurate reflection of the social reality of Mark's time: Economic and political circumstances in the decade prior to the upheavals of the Roman-Jewish war had dispossessed significant portions of the Palestinian population. Illness and disability were an inseparable part of the cycle of poverty for the peasantry, as it still is today. In Mark, Jesus' special attention to the crowd (mentioned some 38 times) articulates an emphatic bias toward the poor.

Jesus withdraws for solitude in 1:35, establishing a narrative rhythm of action and reflection (see 6:31). There is a triple refrain in the first half of the story in which Jesus retreats from synagogue hostility to safety (1:29; 3:7; 6:6f.). It has been suggested that Mark's portrayal of the home as a positive site (5:38; 7:17,24; 9:33; 10:10; 14:3) over against synagogue and temple (always sites of political conflict) may reflect the experience of the early church, whose symbolic center was not an institutional cultus but the common life.

Mark now narrates a series of symbolic actions in which Jesus attacks the most basic pillars of the prevailing social order. He begins with the purity and debt codes (1:40-2:12), two mutually reinforcing cultural systems based upon the temple cult of sacrifice and atonement, under the jurisdiction of the priestly and scribal classes. The debt (or sin) code regulated social obligation and behavior (the Ten Commandments), while the purity code, with its definitions of clean and unclean, established and policed group boundaries within the body politic.

The leper represented the archetypal social outcast due to impurity. The extensive Levitical regulations regarding leprosy stipulated that the contagion was communicable and that the priest must preside over ritual cleansing. Both principles are challenged by Jesus in this episode, which revolves around the repeated use of the key verb to declare clean.

By responding to the leper's request (1:40), Jesus is assuming the priestly prerogative. But rather than a ritual, Jesus simply touches the leper (1:41). According to the purity code, Jesus would thus contract the impurity; instead, the leper is pronounced clean (1:42). The cultural system is thus subverted and social contact with the unclean affirmed (later we find Jesus accepting the hospitality of a leper, 14:3).

The aftermath is the key to the story. Jesus is indignant (1:43) and dispatches the man to the priests. His task, however, is not to publicize a miracle but to help confront an ideological system (1:44). Cooperation with the Mosaic ritual is for the purpose of "witnessing against them," a technical phrase in Mark for confronting one's opponents (see 6:11, 13:9), suggesting a protest against the entire purity apparatus under priestly control.

The mission, however, aborts: The leper goes public, and Jesus is forced to lie low. He must "avoid the cities" (1:45) because he is now a marked man due to his social contact with the leper. This sets the tone for Jesus' campaign: His acts of healing will be interpreted either as liberation or lawless defiance, depending upon one's commitment to the prevailing socio-cultural order.

JESUS RETURNS QUIETLY to Capernaum but is soon discovered; he is now hounded by both the sick and the suspicious (2:1f.). As in 1:22, Mark posits an essential opposition between the "teaching" of Jesus (2:2,7) and the "reasoning" of the scribes (2:6,8). And as with the leper, Jesus' act of healing raises a deeper ideological issue, this time regarding the debt code.

According to this code, the physically disabled were excluded from full status in the community because of their imperfection, believed to be a result of some sin in their family line. Rather than simply curing the man, Jesus chooses to challenge the system by granting forgiveness (release from debt), by which the man's social status is fully restored, regardless of his physical state (2:5,7).

The scribes object, claiming that only God can adjudicate release from sin (2:7). This is not, however, a defense of Yahweh's sovereignty but of their own social power, since as interpreters of Torah they in fact control the determination of indebtedness. This role, as in the case of the priests, is specifically expropriated by the "Son of Man" (2:10), Daniel's apocalyptic metaphor for the true adjudicator of the justice of God (Daniel 7:13f.). The healing has a double result: The man "takes up his bed and walks," his personhood reinstated (2:9-12); the crowd worships God, the collective body restored to wholeness (2:12).

Having undermined the ideological hegemony of priest and scribe, Jesus next turns to confront a social group whose power and influence were rapidly ascending in Mark's time. The Pharisaic sect attempted to extend the purity and debt codes to the masses through a program of popular piety. Indeed after the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E., they emerged as the dominant group within synagogue Judaism. In the next three episodes, Jesus addresses the central tenets of the Pharisaic practice: table fellowship, public piety, and Sabbath observance.

By way of narrative transition, Jesus retires to the sea for the call of Levi, who represents yet another stratum of the socially disenfranchised (2:13f.). Though not poor, toll-collectors were despised as dishonest bureaucrats and representatives of an oppressive colonial administration. Yet they too are called to discipleship and welcomed into Jesus' community.

The shared meal in Mediterranean culture represented the heart of social intercourse (2:15). The Pharisees object because the dietary, ritual, and legal issues surrounding table fellowship were their main preoccupation (2:16). Indeed, this brief clash anticipates a more lengthy one later in the story (7:1-5), in which Mark repudiates not only kosher practice (7:14-23) but the whole basis of Pharisaic authority (7:6-13).

We will see in the next study that this debate ultimately concerns Mark's vision of a new social order in which Jew and Gentile are no longer segregated. Here, however, the issue is one of holiness as a pretext for social stratification. The concluding maxim again identifies the sick with the sinner (2:17), linking this episode to Jesus' previous attack upon the debt code. The good news is for the socially outcast; it is not such good news for those who benefit from the status quo.

JESUS NEXT EXCUSES his disciples from a public fast day (2:18-22). Mark's community was no doubt impressed by the rigor of Pharisaic practice, so Jesus, once again drawing from apocalyptic imagery ("on that day"; the "bridegroom," 2:19f.; see Matthew 9:15f.), responds with his famous "wineskins" axiom. The young wine of the discipleship movement must not be co-opted by old forms (cosmetic piety); otherwise, the "new wine" (the true holiness of servanthood, 14:24f.) will be lost.

Finally, the disciples draw fire from the Pharisees for cutting through a field, trampling grain which they then strip to eat (2:23-28). The complaint would appear to refer to Sabbath restrictions regarding transit, sowing, and reaping. Jesus' justification this time appeals to 1 Samuel 21:1-6, citing David's kingly right to break the law when in "need" (2:25f.). As David "commandeered" bread for his soldiers while on campaign, so can Jesus' followers procure grain on their mission with the Son of Man.

But Mark has added something to the Old Testament story: David violated the law because he and his followers were hungry. Matthew, the first interpreter of Mark, certainly understood the point here to be one of justice vs. cultic obligation (see Matthew 12:1-8). And Mark chooses this episode to introduce the term "bread" (2:26), which will later figure decisively as a symbol of community sharing (the feeding of hungry masses in the wilderness, 6:33-44; 8:1-9; 8:14-21).

We may note that each of these three serial episodes addresses some aspect of human sustenance: breaking bread with the socially outcast, ignoring ritual non-eating practices, and procuring grain on the Sabbath. Some sociohistorical background clarifies why these issues arise in relation to the Pharisees. The sites of these stories (table and field) represent what we might today call the "economic sphere" of production and consumption. Serious problems of misappropriation of the fruits of the land existed in Palestine at this time. Galilean peasants resented the control exercised by the Pharisaic establishment over the tithing and marketing of produce. In addition, many poor peasants could not afford to allow their fields to lay fallow during the Sabbath year, which the Pharisees sought to strictly enforce.

The social function of these stories challenges economic control by an elite minority. In order for justice to prevail, table fellowship had to be inclusive. For the poor, hunger was not an issue of ritual piety but a threat to life. Finally, the violation of Sabbath regulations in the grain-field employs civil disobedience to dramatize the issue. This series can be seen as a strong protest against the politics of food in Palestine.

THE GRAINFIELD ACTION sets the stage for another Sabbath controversy in 3:1-6 and the double climax to the Galilee campaign. If the accusation in 2:24 is a kind of legal warning after which charges will be pressed, Jesus' summary "overruling" (2:28) ensures that the conflict will escalate. Sure enough, in 3:2 we are returned to the heart of the symbolic order (the synagogue on a Sabbath, as in 1:21), where the healing story is a context for determined political theater. It is, one might venture, not unlike being arrested for protesting at the Pentagon, being released on recognizance, and going straight to the White House with the same message!

The two issues of the campaign to date - public healing and Sabbath obligation - here converge, bringing to a head the tension suspended since 1:32. Jesus now intends to force the issue publicly, under the glare of media lights, the authorities poised and ready for him to cross the line. It is a showdown between Jesus' mission of compassion to the poor and the ideological imperatives of the dominant order.

In the classic tradition of civil disobedience, Jesus breaks the law in order to raise deeper issues. Before he acts, he challenges his audience with a paraphrase of the great Deuteronomic ultimatum to the people of Israel (see Deuteronomy 30:15f.): "Is it against the law on the Sabbath day to do good or evil?" (3:4). He then adds, wryly, "To save life, or to kill?", contrasting his own healing ministry with the authorities' concern for state security (in Mark the verb "to kill" always refers to political execution; see 6:19, 8:31, 12:5, 14:1).

In a description of Jesus' contempt unparalleled in the New Testament, Mark indicts the audience's obstinacy (literally "stubbornness of heart," 3:5). But beware: The same charge will soon enough be leveled against the disciples as well (see 6:52, 8:17). Enraged, the Galilean officials caucus to begin plotting against Jesus (3:6) - a chilling new development that casts a shadow over the rest of the story, until it culminates in the arrest, trial, and execution of Jesus (see 14:1, 15:1).

This foreboding turn of events is followed with another withdrawal to the sea and summary section (3:7-12). In yet another politically loaded symbolic action, Jesus then commissions the discipleship community to carry on the Messianic vocation (3:13-19). Ascending a mountain in Mosaic fashion, he appoints (the word used in Old Testament accounts of the choosing of Moses and Aaron in 1 Samuel 12:6 and the priests in 1 Kings 12:31, 13:33) the "Twelve" (symbolic of a new tribal confederacy in Israel). This is in effect a declarations of a kind of "popular government-in-exile." Mark will, however, make it clear that this new leadership is not to be patterned upon the model of power (10:35-45).

JESUS RETURNS HOME, again engulfed by the importunate crowd, and Mark fashions the second climax, in which Jesus must face the consequences of his campaign (3:20). His own family believes he has gone too far and, "convinced he is out of his mind" (3:21), urges him to cease and desist. To make matters worse, "the scribes who had come down from Jerusalem" are launching an ideological counteroffensive (3:22).

The composition of 3:21-35 is a sandwich, a favorite Marcan technique of beginning one story, interrupting it with another, and then returning to the original story. This form establishes a fundamental relationship between the two elements. In this case, it dramatizes the widening social rift between Jesus' community and the structures of authority, both the clan and the state.

The exchange in 3:22-30 sees the eruption of patently ideological warfare between Jesus and the scribal officials. Smarting from Jesus' repudiation of their authority (1:22f., 2:6f.), the scribes attempt to undermine Jesus' popular standing by charging that he is in the service of the "prince of demons." It is the predictable strategy of threatened political leaders: neutralize the opposition by identifying them with the mythic archdemon. To borrow from the symbolic stock of our modern Cold War culture, Jesus is being labeled a communist.

As he will do masterfully later in Jerusalem (11:27f.), Jesus debates by turning his accusers' words back on them. Spinning a thinly veiled political parable, he speaks of the inevitability of insurrection in a corrupt and divided social order (3:23-26). He then makes his intentions clear to his scribal antagonists, likening his mission to a thief who "must bind the strong man in order to ransack his house" (3:27). By the end of the debate, Jesus has turned the tables completely: It is his opponents, not he, who are in service of the powers; it is they who blaspheme (3:28-30). As liberation theologian Juan Luis Segundo puts it, "The real sin against the Holy Spirit is refusing to recognize, with 'theological' joy, some concrete liberation that is taking place before one's very eyes."

The reader will recall that Jesus has already been announced as "the stronger one" (1:7); later, in his second campaign, he will "exorcise" a house divided in its purpose (11:15-17). Mark is here revealing the political geography of the apocalyptic struggle initiated in 1:13: Jesus (a.k.a. the true "Lord of the House," 13:35) is leading a revolt against the powers (a.k.a. the scribal establishment) in a battle not only for the hearts and minds of the people but for history itself.

Mark appears to have taken his cue from Isaiah's vision: Yahweh will liberate the captives from the oppressive grip of the strong ones (Isaiah 49:24f.); the powers will be bound and imprisoned (Isaiah 24:2 If.). And however unsettling the metaphor of criminal breaking and entering may seem, Mark drew it from the most enduring of the primitive Christian eschatological traditions: the advent of the Lord as a thief in the night (Matthew 24:43; 1 Thessalonians 5:2,4; 2 Peter 3:10; Revelation 3:3, 16:15).

In conclusion, Mark returns to the brewing family crisis; Jesus' rupture with the social order will now be complete (3:31-35). In antiquity, the kinship system rigidly determined personality and identity, controlled vocational prospects, and facilitated socialization. Jesus understands that in order to weave an alternative social fabric, there must be a new kinship model: The discipleship community is a family of "whoever does the will of God" (3:35).

The campaign draws to a close as Jesus again retires to the sea to reflect on the state of the Messianic mission (4:lf.). In the first of two extended parabolic sermons (13:4f.), Jesus illustrates the kingdom of God with images drawn from daily peasant life, its hardship and its wisdom. These parables speak frankly of the obstacles to the discipleship adventure (4:3-25) and enjoin revolutionary patience (4:21-32). The sermon concludes with an insistence that, despite the long odds, the small seed (the discipleship community) will indeed take root in a hostile world (4:30-32), echoing the prophetic promise that God will "bring low the high tree and make high the low tree" (Ezekiel 17:22-24).

IN HIS SYMBOLIC ACTION, Mark's Jesus attacks a social order that had betrayed the ideological basis upon which it was founded. As our modern social codes are allegedly rooted in social contract theory and the notion of constitutional rights, so in Judaism there was a covenant with Yahweh. The debt system was originally meant to promote the notion that life and the land are gifts from God, which the people must share with God and each other, so that equality and economic sufficiency might flourish in the community. Similarly, the purity system was supposed to maintain the notion of a chosen or holy people, to preserve a sense of Israel's communal identity distinct from the social practices of surrounding cultures.

But, as in our own society, these social ideals had become the pretext for erection of class divisions within Israel and the mechanism for exploitation and control by the few. The three great dictums of this section (2:10, 2:27, and 3:4) reiterate that any and all social codes must function, to rephrase it in modern parlance, solely for people, not for profit.

The social context reflected in Mark's narrative may be alien from our own in form, but not in substance. Our world is hardly free of apartheid, class stratification, or strong men. These must be unmasked, and symbolic direct action is perhaps the most powerful means. When protesters trespass the sacred sites of nuclear weapons bunkers and arms factories, they are directly challenging the sanctity of these holy sites, symbolized by barbed wire, and their priestly caretakers with security clearances. The same is true of those who open their homes and churches to the refugee or homeless poor, regardless of official social boundaries.

Does interpreting Jesus' acts of healing and exorcism as symbolic action preclude seeing them also as concrete acts of compassion on individuals? Not at all; however, we need to be careful about issues pertaining to our own cultural biases concerning health. Even in our overwhelmingly biomedical culture, contagion is still socially determined - witness the political epidemiology surrounding the new leprosy of AIDS.

There are many today who simply do not believe that their liberation is dependent upon being able to talk or walk, for example. Wheelchair-bound persons are insisting on equal social access, while the deaf community insists that sign language be respected as an equal by the dominant verbal culture. The traditional definitions of physical and mental disability, with their ideologies of dependence and segregation, are being challenged by the demand for the right to fully human - not handicapped - lives in society. Obviously, this also challenges interpretations which stress the bio-medical definition of wholeness in biblical narratives of healing.

By focusing upon the broader socio-symbolic meaning of illness and healing, the stories address us all equally, as well as our own unjust cultural systems. This is missed not only by those who seek to demythologize the biblical miracle stories, but also by those who endeavor to see their significance only as literal, medical cures, since both uncritically accept the bio-medical perspective. After all, for Mark, the true barriers to discipleship have nothing to do with physical impairment, but with spiritual and ideological disorders: "Having eyes can you not see? Having ears can you not hear?" (8:18).

Jesus' ministry is a model for nonviolent resistance to any and all oppressive socio-political systems. In acting to expose the realities of power and privilege through acts of compassion and confrontation, the community of faith truly carries on the mission assigned to it on the mountain (3:14f).

Ched Myers held a degree in New Testament from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, and was author of a commentary on Mark's gospel published by Orbis Press, when this article appeared.