Mark: Voices at Midnight
See Mark 14:53-65.
Mark's account of the trial of Jesus is like the script for a movie, as absurd as Kafka's Trial, reminding us of show trials in the Soviet Union, racist trials in the United States, the case of Stephen Lawrence: "This is the world of the door broken in at five in the morning, the interrogation block, the questions you cannot understand, to which you cannot guess the right answers, the hustling from place to place in sealed vans, the wrapped bundle dropped by the side of the country road." Williams might have mentioned the "disappeared" of Latin America and, had he written later, the camp at Guantanamo Bay where a democratic country sanctions and uses a form of torture known as 'water boarding'. Power is unaccountable in two ways: responsibility is unattributable; and there is no logic to the system. If we think this is a little far-fetched, we only have to remind ourselves of how we are treating, and propose to treat, exiles, immigrants and foreigners who are lumped together in the popular imagination.
Jesus is arrested in the dark and hustled to a private and illegal hearing with false witnesses who are, even by the standards of this hearing, inadequate, so the High Priest seeks self incrimination.
After evading the designation in the whole of the Gospel, Jesus says "Yes", he is the Son of God. The affirmation resonates in Mark's world, full of absurdity and demons, where no word is safe. By now Jesus is powerless and he is going to die. He goes on to talk of divine judgment with its human face and not the contortions of the High Priest. The transcendence, the freedom here is the complete alienation from the world; it is "God's voice at midnight".
At this point there is no risk we will mistake what Jesus means. Then, when he is handed over to be abused and beaten by the mob, his prophesy resumes in his silence. Until He speaks, Jesus could be understood (as many understand him now) simply as a great teacher but after this there is no doubt. This is God as weak which poses the question of where we expect to see and hear God most clearly. Where is God? "God is simply that which makes it natural and necessary to act against insanity and violence. God is the reality that, simply by being what it is ... establishes that violence cannot fill up the whole space of the world".
God cannot under-write virtue as that would mean 'trumping' earthly power; there is no assurance of final victory. Coming in glory is not an escape or revenge. Languages about God as power, as safety, as a domesticated entity, does not work. Transcendence is of its own self, it needs no justification. The same is true of the Resurrection where Mark is bald to the point of leaving it to us to work out what it means.
Mark has important things to say about time. One of the ways religion has exercised power is to tell people to tolerate the present for the sake of the future; but there is no way of escaping into the future. Mark turns us to the cross and our life today. The Gospel of the crucified asks us to look at our Church now, not to the liberal pure church of the future nor the traditionalist pure church of the past. For all its sense of film and fiction Mark leads us to a central point of stillness.
Starting Points for Discussion (Society):
- Why has there been so little protest at the American use of torture?
- What is the difference between asylum seekers, illegal immigrants, EU citizens seeking work; and how much does it matter?
- Is due process simply a matter of being consistent?
- How have you coped with helplessness in what seems like a faceless society?
- Is God supposed to make us feel safe?
- What does Mark's account of the trial tell us about society?